Mark Cuban downplays importance of sports viewership data: ‘Ratings are irrelevant’

Mark Cuban is urging everyone to stop paying attention to television ratings.

The Dallas Mavericks minority owner believes looking at sports viewership through a traditional lens is an antiquated way to judge the health of a sports league. Instead, Cuban thinks “subscription retention” is the KPI of the future. In a recent interview with Front Office Sports, Cuban downplayed the importance of ratings data, pointing to other indicators like churn rate as providing a better overall picture into a league’s popularity.

“It’s not about ratings anymore. You guys love to talk about ratings. Ratings are irrelevant. It’s subscriptions and churn. Do you create new subscriptions? Because that’s the money,” Cuban asserts. “Yes, they sell ads, and yes, they want to sell more. But that’s not the primary source of revenue.”

To be sure, neither advertising nor streaming are the “primary source of revenue” for sports leagues in 2026, at least from a media standpoint. The golden goose remains the pay-TV bundle, be that cable, satellite, or a virtual alternative like YouTube TV. And the rights deals leagues strike with broadcasters, including the NBA’s recent 11-year, $76 billion agreements, are still largely a direct function of how much leverage a league’s programming can provide broadcasters during distribution negotiations. And how is that leverage determined? Television ratings. The more people watch your stuff, the more money you can extract from distributors, and the more you’re willing to pay a league for broadcast rights.

That’s not to say streaming isn’t becoming a much larger part of the equation, as Cuban suggests. We all know that the traditional pay-TV bundle is declining, and as streaming continues to grow, subscriber retention will become a vital part of how media companies value their deals with sports leagues. And it is certainly fair to criticize how ratings are covered in some corners of the media, which is often uncritical and lacking important context. It is also true that ratings, at least on a year-to-year basis, are largely irrelevant for the leagues. Unless there’s a major rights negotiation coming up, a league’s viewership in a given year won’t dramatically change its financials.

The equation is a bit different for broadcasters, whose distribution agreements come to term every few years. But on the whole, ratings only matter insomuch as there are clear, quantifiable trends. Year-to-year noise doesn’t move the needle.

And, to Cuban’s point, media companies are willing to pay a premium for sports that will move the needle for their streamers. Cuban mentions Peacock spending $100 million for a single NFL game as “what broke the bank for everybody” after the NBC-owned streamer retained many of the millions of new subscribers it attracted for that game. That said, Peacock’s churn rate remains well above its peers, a not-so-encouraging sign for the streamer that has put the most emphasis out of anybody on live sports programming.

So is the Mavericks owner right to say ratings are irrelevant? Well, kind of. They certainly matter when taking a long view on a league. But whether a single game is up or down year-over-year? That doesn’t matter so much. And as streaming continues to become a larger part of the media business for sports leagues, subscriptions and churn rate might become the more important KPIs when valuating rights deals. But ratings are not completely obsolete. They’re just one of many data points worth considering.