Via SBJ (sub required), the Yankees sold 6,000 subscriptions, which, at $49.95 a pop, comes out to $300,000 in revenue. MLB Advanced Media gets half, and the Yankees split the rest with the cable providers.
Is that good? Well, according to the SBJ article, some people claimed it beat expectations, while others claimed it fell short. IMHO, 6k is more than I would have figured — I’ve explained why I don’t think it’s a good value for customers, so the fact that it got any traction at all is a bit surprising.
But really, the subscription numbers themselves don’t really tell the story here — $300k is nothing for the Yankees, Cablevision, and BAM, especially when it’s split between all of them. And even if there were ten times as many buyers, it still wouldn’t move the needle much at any of those companies. So I’d be more interested in seeing how people are using it. Are those 6,000 subscribers engaged? How many times did they actually use it — once a week, once a month, once period?
If people are actually using it, then this is a scalable model. But I’m still skeptical, as long as people are paying for cable as well — this is undoubtedly the model of the future, but $49.95 still seems like a steep price point for the time being.
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