- Full Speed launched on Netflix in 2024 and now airs on Prime Video
- Herbst says Prime Video deal helps “futureproof” Nascar content
90 per cent of viewers who tuned in to Nascar’s Full Speed docuseries didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs the year before, according to the series’ chief media and revenue officer Brian Herbst.
Speaking at SportsPro New York in March, Herbst revealed that Nascar’s efforts to recreate Formula One’s Drive to Survive has helped take the series to new audiences.
“We actually launched [production for Full Speed] in February 2023,” he said. “The results came back, it was trending in the top five on Netflix for the first ten days.
“But the most important data point, at least for me, was 90 per cent of the people that watch that show, they did not watch a single minute of the Nascar playoffs the year before.
“So that’s top-of-the-funnel stuff, where you grow the personalities of your drivers, the stars of your sport. Hopefully at some point you bring them down the funnel and they’ll watch a three-hour Nascar race, but leveraging platforms like an Amazon, like a Netflix, to tell the story of our drivers has been really successful for us.”
Full Speed debuted on Netflix in 2024 and covered the regular season finale in Daytona before focusing on the 2023 playoffs.
The latest season of Full Speed aired on streaming platform Prime Video, which is one of Nascar’s four main broadcasters alongside Fox Sports, NBC and Warner Bros Discovery.
Prime Video’s streaming audiences last year skewed nearly seven years younger than linear viewers – though a median age of 56.1 still underlines the work ahead in attracting younger fans to the sport.
That said, Nascar still has a mix of partners to cater for different viewing habits.
Partnering with a streaming platform was therefore a key part of the series’ strategy to futureproof itself in a digital age where viewers are cutting the cord, which has meant traditional cable networks are struggling to replicate the viewership figures of the past.
“We’re not at 100 million pay-TV homes [in the US], we’re at about 60 or so,” Herbst explained. “And we saw cable going [down] and we saw digital streaming going [up]. However, the economics associated – at least for a property like ours – from the cable ecosystem were still really strong, even in 2023.
“So even if the cable environment has decreased and you’re seeing some erosion there, it was still a profitable business and continues to be a profitable business for partners like ours – like a Fox Sports 1, USA [Network] on the cable side, certainly TNT as another partner and ESPN – and a lot of the economics in our deal in 2023 were still tied to the cable ecosystem.
“So if you think about the rights fees associated with Nascar content, we’re over US$1 billion in media rights value for content. That being said, there’s only about US$200 million of advertising associated with our content, so that delta comes from the value of Nascar’s content to the cable ecosystem and now to the streamers.
“What was really important, though, if we’re trying to look forward – not in just a two or three-year deal but we ended up doing a seven-year deal – is if digital streaming is going [up] and there’s erosion in the cable marketplace, strategically we needed to partner with streamers in order to futureproof our content and also be available to younger demos that are over-indexed on the digital and streaming side.”
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