Social media destroying F1 revenue stream like it did in NASCAR and IndyCar

Motorsports is being played like a fiddle by social media. Social media hits are not translating into higher TV ratings and fixing that is the $64 question.

Social media is great, right? Well it's great for the fans, it's free and they do not have to watch the race TV broadcasts to follow a race, important for those that have very busy lives.

AR1.com pointed out years ago that social media would destroy TV ratings and TV ratings are the life blood of any racing series. Social media generates zero revenue in sponsor dollars to the teams.

Zero!

Almost all sponsor revenue contract values are based on TV viewership.

Now F1 has been hit with the social media disaster. New F1 owners Liberty media, obviously green behind the ears, made a big push into social media in 2017 and TV ratings took a tumble. They bragged that social media hits were up 54.6%.

That's nice, but that generates zero revenue. The only ones who get the revenue are the Facebooks, Instagrams and Twitters of the world…..laughing all the way to the bank while the motorsports paddocks begin to run dry of money.

Official figures released by F1 last year revealed that it had 390 unique million viewers in 2016 but a press release distributed by the series this week claimed that that 2017 was actually far lower with at most 352.3 million unique viewers.

The lower audience figure may well send shivers down the spines of F1 team bosses.

That is because sponsorship rates tend to be proportionate to the number of viewers on TV and last year the teams were selling space on their cars on the strength of the 390 million audience figure which was released by F1 in the most official of sources.