Nobody counts the people watching in the pub

Out-of-home viewing is the largest untracked audience in sport, and rights valuations quietly pretend it does not exist.

Forty people in a bar, one screen, one meter reading somewhere that says nothing at all. That is the hole in the middle of every reach figure a broadcaster puts in front of a rights holder, and it has been there for decades.

Audience measurement grew up in living rooms. A panel household gets a device, everyone in it presses a button, and the sample is grossed up to the population. It works reasonably well for a drama. It works badly for a derby, because a derby is the one thing people leave the house to watch together. Pubs, clubhouses, works canteens, student halls, the back room of a barbershop with the sound down. None of that lands in the base sample in any serious way.

Some markets bolt on an out-of-home panel and publish a combined number. Fine. But the panel is small, the venues are weighted by guesswork, and the uplift it produces is treated as a bonus line rather than as part of the real audience. I have watched executives quote the in-home figure to a broadcaster and the combined figure to a sponsor in the same week, and both were technically true.

Why it matters is money. A sport negotiating rights is selling attention, and attention it cannot evidence is attention it gives away free. Sports with a strong communal viewing habit, which usually means the ones with the most passionate followings, are systematically undersold against sports people watch alone on a sofa. Cricket in some markets, football everywhere, boxing on a big night.

There is a second problem, and it cuts the other way. The out-of-home audience is not a paying audience in the same sense. One subscription, forty viewers. A rights holder who succeeds in proving that group exists has also proved that its revenue per viewer is far worse than it claimed. That is an uncomfortable slide to put in a board pack.

My view is that the sport should publish it anyway. The number that gets measured becomes the number that gets optimised, and right now the optimisation runs towards content that plays well to an isolated viewer with a phone in the other hand. Communal viewing is the thing the sport is actually good at. Refusing to count it does not protect the valuation. It just hands the argument to whoever brings a spreadsheet.