Digital sports media company WAVE.tv has been striking lots of content deals with leagues recently, including one with Top Rank. Their latest deal is an expansion of an existing deal with FloSports, which will see WAVE.tv add even more FloWrestling and FloGrappling content (both live and library) to its Haymakers subbrand (a combat sports-focused channel with presences on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and more). Here’s more on that from a release:
WAVE.tv, one of the fastest growing sports and entertainment companies on the planet with more than 100 million followers globally, announced today it has expanded its relationship with FloSports, a leading sports streaming and original content platform, further tapping into the company’s popular FloWrestling, FloGrappling and other vertical sports libraries. The agreement enables WAVE.tv to continue delivering FloSports’ ‘best of’ content across all digital platforms, while also creating new programming for its Gen-Z audience utilizing FloSports’ current live programming and historical content archives.
FloWrestling is the world’s #1 destination for youth, collegiate and senior-level competitive wrestling, and FloGrappling is the leading source for jiu-jitsu fanatics. Content from both platforms consistently ranks among the most-viewed content across WAVE.tv’s sports network, including on HAYMAKERS, WAVE.tv’s home for true fight fans with more than 10 million global followers, up from 2.2 million in January 2021. Since the initial partnership launched, WAVE.tv has created over 30 FloSports specific programming pieces per month on average, achieving over 250 million aggregate views.
“We are thrilled to continue our collaboration with FloSports to bring the best wrestling and grappling programming in the world to our audience across HAYMAKERS and the broader WAVE.tv network,” said Daniel Maas, Senior Vice President, Rights Partnerships, WAVE.tv. “Our content creation, storytelling, and distribution expertise coupled with FloSports’ desire to leverage their rich library to reach and acquire new customers is the perfect marriage.”
“Our relationship with WAVE.tv has been incredibly valuable and wildly exceeded our expectations,” says Sarah Hoffman, Director, Digital Marketing at FloSports. “Utilizing their network has bolstered our brands and our content with an essential audience of sports fans. WAVE.tv is helping us connect and engage with a new generation of sports fanatics and converting them to paying subscribers. We are excited that we are expanding our partnership.”
As WAVE.tv senior vice president (strategy and partnerships) Greg Bobolo told AA around their Top Rank deal, combat sports is an area they’re particularly focused on growing:
“Combat sports is very important. WAVE.tv has really taken this sort of portfolio approach to its media brands, we have about 25 different media brands. The best way to think about WAVE.tv is sort of a front door to a house of brands that live behind it, and we’ve kind of gone sport by sport and genre by genre or fandom by fandom to create these unique brands behind the WAVE.tv brand.”
“…Haymakers is one of three brands we’re going to be really focusing on and leaning into very heavily, investing more over the coming months and years. …It’s done incredibly well and we see a very bright future for what this can become.”
Here’s one past example of FloSports/Haymakers content, an August video on U.S. Olympic wrestler Gable Stevenson:
An interesting part of the WAVE.tv approach is that these various channels are covering all sorts of different events, some even from different sports, as seen with Haymakers being featured in a boxing deal with Top Rank and now this deal with FloWrestling and FloGrappling. There’s certainly a focus on trying to build channels that will appeal to fans of many different combat sports. And an expanded deal with FloSports should help them grow that further.
[Haymakers on Instagram]
