A ways to go
Monday’s news from Major League Baseball’s online team reminds us how far the digital world has to go to replicate offline revenue streams.
The news, on its face, was good: MLB has made nearly $1 million on its iPhone app since launching it early this month. It actually grossed $1.3 million, which puts it just shy of the seven-figure mark after Apple’s 30 percent cut. Silicon Alley Insider says MLB’s repurposed content makes this a profitable enterprise.
And yet. A million dollars sounds good until one considers that MLB makes tens of millions of dollars per year on its national TV contracts, and hundreds of millions more locally. The YES Network alone brought in $360 million last year.
MLB’s approximate $910,000 net revenue on the MLB app barely buys a decent TV campaign on one of its local affiliates. Heck, it wouldn’t even pay Pedro Feliciano’s salary.
With all the doom and gloom about old media floating around, it’s no surprise that media outlets are looking for good-news stories. But it will take a lot more than a million bucks from the iTunes store to make up for the potential lost revenue as people move from radio and TV to webcasts.