NASCAR’s Digital Team Ready To Meet The Changing Media Landscape

As the TV landscape transitions from linear to streaming, professional sports leagues are changing with it. And that includes NASCAR.

Television was once the only way most NASCAR fans, at least those not at the track, could see racing. And the TV ratings have been a measure of success, important for networks to set the advertising rates and influence sponsorship for the sanctioning body and teams.

But the way viewers digest their sports has been changing. No longer are suburban neighborhoods topped with TV antennas and consumers have been “cutting the cord” getting rid of traditional cable and switching to streaming platforms.

As that media landscape changed, NASCAR has changed with it. With streaming becoming more popular year by year, the sport has built up its online presence and continues to do so.

NASCAR started an online presence in the mid-1990s. Back then the site was basic, offering little beyond news, results, standings, an online store, and crude video clips. Turner Sports acquired the digital rights to the site in 2000. NASCAR reacquired the site in 2013 and relaunched it in 2013. Along with this NASCAR Digital Media started in 2012, first designing websites for teams and taking on a number of digital initiatives for the industry. It has also grown the sanctioning body’s digital platform, adding many features that can help fans follow the races in real time, and the sport off the track.

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NASCAR.com was relaunched at the start of 2023. According to Wyatt Hicks, vice president of NASCAR Digital, it wasn’t about a complete overhaul of the site, it was about responding, and adapting to the changing media landscape.

“We really haven’t touched the homepage, the major content sections, roughly in about three to four years,” he said. “With the increasing shift of consumption on mobile devices, our web platform is about 50% mobile; If you add in our apps it balloons up to about 81% mobile now. So really what we wanted to do with that is think about how those consumption patterns have changed.”

Hicks said it isn’t necessarily about adding more content. It’s about giving visitors what they want.

“We really had to think through strategically what we wanted that experience to be,” he said. “Making sure that we’re getting the most critical information to our fans.

“We knew what fans were looking for and why they were coming to our digital platforms.’

The website serves more than one “mission” according to Hicks.

“The purpose of the NASCAR digital media platform,” he said. “Is to is to give fans what they’re looking for as a means to follow the sport, while also, welcoming new fans and explaining how the sport operates and who our drivers and teams are. It definitely serves a lot of lot of purposes for what we have.”

It’s no surprise that race days are big days on the site. And NASCAR Digital has worked to add elements to the site that take advantage of that traffic.

“A lot of time has been spent over the years,” Hicks said. “Honing those live elements and that live experience and continuing to, to build onto that.”

As part of the relaunch NASCAR added free livestreams from inside every car in every NASCAR Cup Series race became a standard feature as part of its digital race day hub NASCAR Drive and enabled “Live Activities” integration for the NASCAR Mobile App.

“The reception from the fans has been amazing.” Hicks said. “Time spent within that product has increased. The average number of channel changes has increased just because of, of more choices; video views are going up because of it.”

NASCAR also launched NASCAR Classics giving fans an interactive archive of more than 1,000 free, commercial-free race replays spanning seven decades of NASCAR Cup Series races. Since the launch in July NASCAR Classics has had 350,000 visits with 810,000 video views.

For 2023 overall the site had 3% more pageviews than 2022, 2% more visits year over year, 9% more unique users, and 5% more Cup series race day visitors with 70% more growth on race weekends. Monthly visits to the NASCAR Digital app grew by 66% year over year and there was a 100% increase in monthly page views from last season.

NASCAR’s new media rights deal is being finalized and should be announced soon and traditional TV broadcasts on a network or cable outlet will most likely share space with non-linear platforms such as streaming. Hicks and NASCAR Digital aren’t involved in the negotiation for the new rights deal.

“I think it’s a wait and see for us, right?” Hicks said. “Like it’s once those deals are done, we’ll know where we stand, and we’ll make pivots as needed.”

As they have shown in the past few years, however, NASCAR will continue to evolve with the media landscape. In the future the goal for NASCAR Digital is to continue to enhance the fan experience both at the track and during the week away from the track.

“We’re super excited,” Hicks said. “I mean even what we’ve done already. We’re meeting the demands of a rapidly changing fan base and getting a lot of new people into the sport.

“So the fact that we can provide experiences or information or content that helps grow the overall effort is certainly exciting to me and my team.”