Golf YouTube megastar Grant Horvat announced Tuesday that he was refusing an offer to play in the PGA Tour’s Barracuda Championship after the Tour made it clear he would not be allowed to create YouTube content from the experience.
According to Horvat, the Tour said he would not be allowed to film his round during tournament play, citing its own ironclad rules around tournament video as the cause. (Effectively, the rules currently state that only the Tour’s high-paying TV network partners and the Tour itself are allowed to shoot and create video from inside the gates of a Tour event. Everyone else is deemed a competitor, and thus heavily restricted.)
ACCESS: NOT GRANT-ED
Horvat was a good sport about the whole ordeal, and he should be: His fame as YouTube creator landed him a spot in a freakin’ Tour event. But was he deserving of a one-time exception upending the Tour’s long-standing media regs? I would argue not.
As I’ve written about extensively, some of the value of the PGA Tour’s media rights is tied intrinsically to the exclusivity of its product. If anyone could show up to a PGA Tour event and create a YouTube video of the competition, the Tour’s value proposition on its $750 million per year network partners (roughly speaking: you pay us for the right to broadcast events) would fall apart. In theory, a PGA Tour TV world with unlimited supply would crumble the demand for advertising, which would in turn crumble the entire Tour TV economy.
Of course, Horvat is not capable of single-handedly crushing the PGA Tour’s media apparatus at one opposite-field event, and his inclusion in the ‘Cuda is the kind of positive-sum media thinking I generally encourage the Tour to engage in more seriously.
But the rules around filming competition exist to keep the PGA Tour profitable, and I don’t blame the Tour for enforcing the rules. For me, the line around so-called “non-sanctioned media” is clear: Media should have the right to shoot and post video of most of the things happening outside tournament play, but once the balls are in the air, the stage belongs to the TV partners paying for it.
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BUT WAIT…
Wouldn’t Horvat’s involvement in the Barracuda increase TV ratings and interest in the event, thereby increasing the sponsor value of the tournament?
Perhaps, I say. But for all my criticism of the Tour’s media rules enforcement as it relates to things other than competition (relaxing the video rules around practice rounds, for example, would be quite fine with me), the Tour has a right and an obligation to exercise its media rights quite stringently around competition. The Tour’s TV partners at NBC and CBS pay a fortune for the right to broadcast the PGA Tour, and handing over those rights for free to a player with a big audience sets a dangerous precedent. The PGA Tour is in the business of building audience, but not at the expense of its own bottom line.
