Key insights
- Attention as a commercial currency is collapsing. Sponsors can buy cheaper CPMs on Meta or Google. Sports organisations still leading with reach are going to find sponsorship conversations getting harder.
- The single most commercially valuable fan data set combines three points: contact information, location, and fan intensity (casual, engaged, or superfan). Together they enable segmentation, personalisation, and genuine lifetime value calculation.
- A defined, engaged cohort of known fans is worth more to a brand partner than two million anonymous followers. Scarcity and relationship depth are the currencies sponsors actually want to buy.
- Fans are more likely to pay for membership when it offers something that cannot be screenshotted or replicated from the outside: unrepeatable experiences, real-time influence, and genuine insider access.
- Revenue is generated by relationship depth, not reach. Reach is infinite, commodified, and controlled by platforms that don’t care about your business. Known fan relationships are finite, valuable, and entirely within your control.
Something came up at our recent Solution Series events that I keep coming back to. We were running a set of challenges designed to force a real conversation about fan engagement. Not the feel-good kind. The kind that actually generates revenue for sports organisations.
And what became very clear is that most organisations are still selling a product that sponsors no longer want to buy.
That product is attention. And attention, as a currency, is collapsing.
The only fan engagement metric that matters right now
At the event, teams were given a single provocation: pick one metric that now defines success. Name it and explain why it’s better than views.
One team merged three data points: contact info, location info, and fan intensity (casual, engaged, or superfan).
Those simple points are more powerful than anything in your current analytics dashboard. Can we reach you, where are you, and how much do you care? With that, you can segment offers by geography, tailor content by engagement level, prove to sponsors exactly who’s paying attention, and calculate lifetime value instead of guessing based on impressions.
Views don’t tell you any of that. All viewing numbers tell you that a person existed in front of a screen for a moment.
The fan engagement product that reach can’t build
One of the sharpest challenges of the night was to design one product that only known fans can access.
The concept that landed best was a “Founding Members Community.” Limited spots. First come, first served. Exclusive merch, events, and experiences delivered in the fan’s birthday month every year.
Why it worked: scarcity, recurring value, and data capture that felt like a privilege rather than a transaction. No forms or surveys to fill in, but to get in, you had to be known.
A defined, engaged cohort of fans is infinitely more valuable to a brand partner than 2 million anonymous followers. This was a status economy which can generate revenue in ways that reach never can.
Another team went direct-to-consumer with a Superfan Paid Membership: exclusive content, event access, and the ability to co-host with the community. This works if the behind the scenes content genuinely can’t be found elsewhere. But co-hosting means real-time influence. That’s an opportunity fans will actually pay for.
Fans are more likely to pay for membership when it offers something they can’t screenshot or replicate from the outside.
What sponsors are actually buying from fan engagement now
Sponsors don’t buy impressions anymore, so what do they buy? Access, proof, or influence?
Proof is a number sponsors can take back to their board.
“We grew known fans by 34% this quarter.” “72% of our database engaged in the last 30 days.” “Our superfans spend 6x more than casual followers.”
Reach-led sponsorship pitches are getting harder to land, and the gap between organisations that can prove fan relationships and those that can’t is widening every renewal cycle.
Belonging as a fan monetisation model
One of the challenge categories on the night was “The Cult,” which asked teams to think about ‘belonging’ as a commercial lever. How do you create the kind of connection that makes fans feel like they’re part of something, rather than just watching?
The highest-scoring concepts all understood that community isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a revenue engine.
One team proposed what they called a “Ceremonial FOMO Moment,” designed around shared ritual, rather than content. Something that only happens if you’re there.
When FOMO is built around a genuine experience, something unrepeatable, something you had to show up for, it becomes a loyalty accelerator. You can’t recap your way into having been part of it.
What this means for fan engagement and revenue
By the end of the night, a pattern had emerged across every solution. Revenue isn’t generated by reach. It’s generated by relationship depth.
The teams that built the best ideas stopped designing for “audience growth” and started designing for fan progression:
From watcher to member to superfan to insider. From anonymous to known to engaged to advocate. From free to paid to repeat to ambassador.
Every idea that landed built a ladder. If your revenue model depends on reach, you can’t win. Reach is infinite, commodified, and controlled by platforms that don’t care about your business. Relationship is finite, valuable, and entirely within your control.
Turning strangers into believers, and believers into revenue: that’s the model. A decade from now, the organisations with the strongest commercial positions won’t be the ones who chased the biggest follower counts. They’ll be the ones who built the deepest fan relationships and knew exactly what those relationships were worth.
FAQs
Fan engagement generates revenue when it creates known, segmented relationships rather than anonymous reach. Once you know who your fans are, where they are, and how deeply they care, you can personalise commercial offers, build premium membership tiers, provide sponsors with proof-based packages, and calculate genuine fan lifetime value. Revenue follows relationship depth, not audience size.
Fan intensity is a way of segmenting your audience by how engaged they actually are: casual viewers, regularly engaged fans, and superfans who are deeply invested in the club or property. By combining contact information, location, and intensity score, sports organisations can create commercial offers tailored to each group, prove engagement depth to sponsors, and focus acquisition investment on the fans most likely to convert to paid relationships.
The memberships that generate real revenue offer something that cannot be replicated from the outside: unrepeatable experiences, genuine access, real-time influence, or insider status that feels earned rather than purchased. Fans pay for the feeling of being part of something, not just for content. Scarcity, recurring value, and a clear progression from free to paid to premium are the structural elements that make membership economically sustainable.
Because impressions are available more cheaply through direct digital channels. A sponsor paying a premium for sports association needs to justify that investment against Meta or Google CPMs, and “brand awareness” is no longer enough on its own. Sponsors increasingly want proof of genuine fan engagement: contact-level data, participation metrics, and evidence that their activation reached fans who were actually paying attention rather than just present in front of a screen.
The Solution Series is Dizplai’s peer-to-peer problem-solving event format for senior commercial and marketing leaders in sport. Each event runs timed problem sprints on real industry challenges around fan engagement, first-party data, and audience monetisation. Attendees leave with practical ideas tested in a room full of people facing the same pressures. Register your interest for upcoming events at dizplai.com/solution-series.
Solution Series will be back.
Our first events are done, and the ideas that came out of them are already in people’s hands.
If you want to be in the room next time, get your name down now. When we announce dates, the spots will go quickly.
The anonymous fan costs you money, and the known fan makes you money. The only question is when you start building the system that captures the difference.
