Baseball Season Proved FanDuel Can Deliver Bigger Audiences, More Data About Fans

It’s possible that the biggest winner this baseball season wasn’t Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge or Cal Raleigh. 

It might be the former Bally regional sports networks, now bundled up as FanDuel Sports Network.

After emerging from bankruptcy and getting rebranded, FanDuel Sports Network reports that with just a handful of games remaining, it averaged a Total Audience Delivery of 1.5 million daily viewers across linear, out-of-market and streaming platforms, up a whopping 18% over the 2024 season.

Baseball has done well this season nationally and FanDuel Sports Network’s success is “a combination of the ensuing popularity of baseball and proving that our emerging streaming platforms enable us to grow our total audience,” David Coletti, head of research at the network told The Measure. 

Total Audience Delivery is a measurement adopted by FanDuel to measure its national delivery, not just its in-market delivery of local team games, boosting the reach it offers national advertisers. 

“This season’s results are a powerful validation of the scale and sustainability of what we’re creating, driving growth for clubs, delivering value for partners, and reshaping the local sports media business long term. We’re excited to carry this momentum into the NHL and NBA seasons this fall,” said David Preschlack, CEO of Main Street Sports Group, FanDuel Sports Network’s parent company.

The big numbers come for baseball as it is putting the finishing touches on negotiating new national deals following ESPN’s call that it was paying too much for its MLB rights. ESPN is expected to grab a different baseball package, with NBC and Netflix also playing ball with MLB.

Linear TV ratings were up 16%, with seven of the nine teams FanDuel Sports Network has local rights to showing growth. 

With cord cutting, the FanDuel Sports Network have been aggressively pushing subscriptions to its local streaming services. It said that since Opening day, nearly 1 million unique users streamed their hometown teams through the FanDuel Sports Network app, an increase of 70% from last year. Fans watched more than 2.8 billion minutes of baseball, making this the most-streamed season in network history. 

Total streaming minutes jumped 1.1% and on average, fans watched 92 minutes per game. Unique streamers per game grew 94% from a year ago. 

FanDuel Sports Network says its features come from Nielsen Media Research, NLTV & local Market Sports Reports and Google Analytics.

“Our direct-to-consumer growth is the clearest signal yet of how fans want to connect with their teams,”said  Michael Schneider, COO, DTC, Main Street Sports Group. “Several clubs exceeded our internal subscriber forecasts, and that rapid adoption gives us real momentum for the future. Add in triple-digit streaming gains for some clubs and nearly a billion and a half more minutes watched, and it’s clear the appetite for flexible access is only accelerating.”

Coletti said that FanDuel Sports Network is getting more insights about sports fan from its digital subscribers. 

“It enables us to understand behavior on a real granular level. We have a good handle on how frequently someone is tuning into games, how long they’re spending. That’s actually been a tremendous finding for us,” he said.

“By getting these discrete measure of behavior, it enables us to better produce the experience and cover the game better,” he said.

The data also enhances the networks marketing efforts. 

With baseball season nearly done, FanDuel Sports Network is looking froward to showing NBA and NHL games.

“We are expected to be able to bring a lot of new, robust insights to them and better understand how we’re delivering their fans, which is, of course the most precious resource,” Coletti said. “It’s full speed ahead into the fall as we better quantify all this viewership across platforms,” he said.

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Citing concerns about tariffs and macroeconomic uncertainty, the IAB has released a new outlook that forecasts that ad spending will be lower than previously expected.

The new forecast calls for ad spending to increase 5.7%, 1.6 percentage point lower than the 7.3% forecast it made in January.

The lower forecast comes despite spending holding up pretty much as expected in the first half of the year, showing growth of 7%.

The brunt of the lower spending impacts linear TV and traditional media, while many forms of digital media continue to see double-digit gains. 

The forecast is based on a survey of 204 advertisers and media buyers taken this month. 

Nearly all buyers were concerned about the impact of tariffs, with auto, retail, and consumer electronics the most vulnerable categories.

“The marketplace reacts poorly to uncertainty. With tariff impacts starting to roll through the supply chain, there is a lot of hesitance as to where the economy and consumer sentiment will go over the coming months.” said IAB CEO David Cohen. “Marketers are laser-focused on maintaining the utmost flexibility while driving short-term performance that delivers on their business goals.”

The new forecast calls spending for linear TV to fall by 14.4%, bigger than the 12.7% decline forecast in January. Other traditional media is expected to fall by 3.4%, double the earlier 1.5% forecast.

By contrast, CTV is expected to show a 11.4% increase, down from 13.8% and spending on other digital video is expected to grow 7.4% down from 8.8%. Retail media is expected to increase 13.2%, compared to the 15.6% forecast in January.

Meanwhile, social media spending is expected to jump 14.3%, a larger increase than the 11.9% gain forecast in January.

Also growing faster than previously forecast are podcasts, digital out of home, digital display and gaming. 

“The silver lining in all of this is that the overall attitude of buyers remains positive. Budgets may tighten somewhat, but they’re confident that digital media can deliver the measurable results they need,” concluded Cohen. “This update to our projections should help the industry make the most of the remainder of 2025 while keeping an eye on 2026.”