[larsonf]

At least in baseball, a lot of teams--believe or not--are not run like businesses where the main goal is to earn a profit. Instead, they are run organizations where the main goal is to win. The argument is that winning leads to more business as a fact of the universe. It's bizarre.

I mean, look at that whole MoneyBall thing: instead of trying to focus on understanding why people come to games, the Oakland A' focused on optimizing performance for less, not necessarily more profit for less. So, instead of being disruptive on the business model side, it's disruptive on the game-itself-side. This kind of sentiment is shockingly pervasive.

On the other hand, look at the Giants. The Giants--and you no doubt know about this--do this dynamic pricing where they charge ticket prices based on weather, who's playing, etc, in order to optimize the amount of people coming to games. The focus is business-side. Interestingly, maybe keeping a full stadium is why the Giants win so much.

Shoot, what if you did that but with Machine Learning for all aspects of what the teams sell…tickets to souvenirs to hotdogs. And what if you made it so teams could email fans (or through some push on an app) saying, 'hey, free tickets today!'. And then what if you brought that to smaller organizations like the minor leagues and then to the NCAA. How many NCAA teams are there, like 10000?

[aidenn0]

In baseball, currently, the TV contract dominates income, which means your income is more or less directly tied to how recently you signed your TV contract. Medium market teams with very recent TV contracts are wealthier than the Atlanta Braves, which has the worst TV contract of all the big-market teams.

The upwards trend of TV contracts clearly isn't sustainable, but trying to extract the maximum value from your attendees just seems less interesting at the present.