Welcome back to The SEG3 Report! In Edition 121, I’m exploring how AFL tapped into the content-creator network to hit record-breaking views, and what non-sports entities can learn from their strategy.

Plus, our speed reads ⤵️

Let’s get into it.

There’s a stereotype of some American households around massive sporting events like the Super Bowl: everyone’s attention is tuned into it and any distractions, like making Thanksgiving dinner, is second. 

If sports was on in my house, it was in the background. My grandparents did love the Yankees (my grandmother affectionately called Bernie Williams ‘my Bernie’), but there was never a demand for singular focus or attention on the game. So now, over a decade after Bernie Williams retired, the idea of looking at your phone during a match doesn’t strike me as strange. 

But for dedicated followers of fashion sports (I couldn’t help myself), there is this idea of the second screen cannibalising viewership. I definitely think this is an issue for film and TV, eking into the way screenwriters have to structure their scripts, but with sports, I just don’t see the problem.

This impulse to blame second-screens for the decline in viewership is understandable, but sports commentator Emily Herbert reframed this concept recently, at SEG3 London, in a way that struck me as incredibly erudite.

She said that when you’re watching a match at a pub or a watch-party, you’re not staring at the TV in silence. You’re talking to your friends, you’re looking around for other people’s reactions, you’re engaged in the sport in different layers. If you’re at home alone, you still have access to those other layers, that social aspect of watching sports, through your phone.

The AFL took this framework and ran with it, to quite a lot of success. 

AFL have partnered with creator Dan Gorringe (Dan Does Footy), backed by broadcast partners 7plus and Kayo Sports, to run The Ultimate Footy Watchalong, a live stream that, critically, carried official AFL '“match vision” rather than just reaction commentary layered over someone's memory of the game. No, I wasn’t really sure what “official match vision” meant either. Basically, it wasn’t a creator talking about the game from outside it; it was a creator inside the broadcast itself.

It started as a single-match pilot in 2025, and in 2026, it expanded into a two-match series Fremantle v Sydney (streamed across 7plus, AFL YouTube and Kayo) and North Melbourne v Melbourne (AFL YouTube and Kayo).

The results were 250,000+ live viewers across the two broadcasts, more than 10 million social video views beyond that. This ran alongside a record-breaking official broadcast. 

The same Fremantle-Sydney match was the highest-rating AFL match of the 2026 season on the main feed, pulling an average audience of 1.4 million and reaching 3.3 million Australians the largest 7plus audience an AFL home-and-away match has ever had. Season viewership is the highest on record, with 110 million-plus Australians tuning in so far.

So the fear that usually accompanies a "creators are taking over sport" headline that they're siphoning audience from the real broadcast doesn't hold up. As Dan Gorringe put it himself: "the stronger both become, the stronger the sport becomes.”

So remember: a creator-led stream doesn't have to compete with your main broadcast for the same attention. Done well, it's an additive second funnel to bring in a different audience for the same match.

Yes, I do love a good paragraph link up.

The numbers are instructive beyond just scale. 65% of viewers on the AFL's YouTube stream were under 34, and the format delivered a double-digit average watch time. This is a strong indicator for a live simultaneous stream rather than a highlights package watched later.

Though exciting, it isn’t entirely surprising. Or, rather, it’s always a good surprise when a strategy like this pays off! But the litmus test has already been proven. We wrote about the same behavioural pattern in Edition 113, covering MKTG's World Cup 26 Fan Pulse report.

It said 52% of fans who engage with creators now trust their match insight over a TV pundit's, rising to 73% planning to follow creators throughout the tournament. FIFA built an entire strategy around it too, giving YouTube global rights to stream the first ten minutes of every World Cup match for free, on the assumption that after minute ten, under-35s reach for their phones anyway.

The AFL's watchalong is the same insight applied earlier, rather than after the fact. Instead of treating that second-screen reach as attention leaking out of the ecosystem, they built somewhere for it to go: a creator fans already trust, inside the tent rather than competing with it.

In short: your audience is going to reach for a second screen regardless, so why not give them somewhere to go that keeps them in your ecosystem?

Sports has been moving this direction for a while, and AFL is the latest to adopt a content creator strategy successfully.

Last summer, Bundesliga named Mark Goldbridge as one of the rights holders of the club, giving him broadcasting rights. This means he could stream not only his reaction to the match, but the match itself as well. 

At the time, Peer Naubert, Chief Executive Officer of Bundesliga International, told the BBC: “By combining established broadcasters with digital platforms and content creators, we are taking a progressive step in how top-level football can be experienced.”

But wait, there’s more.

As we covered in Edition 106, Gary Neville's The Overlap have now acquired Goldbridge's YouTube channels. This is just a spin of the wheel of life, so to speak: personality-led, fan-first media scaling up to support and perhaps in the future, rival, traditional football broadcasting. 

Bundesliga wasn’t alone, though. La Liga, the NFL and the Saudi Pro League all struck their own creator distribution deals in 2025.

So, what's different about the AFL's model is who's behind it?

In my opinion, The Overlap deal was a media company buying its way into creator trust. The AFL's watchalong is the rights holder building that relationship directly, and keeping its own match vision in the deal rather than licensing it away. 

The end result is the same, however: working with, and leveraging, content creators to not only grow your audience, but keep you in control of your IP while you do. Depending on your goals, your strategy has to be reflected in the specific way you work with content creators.

There’s application of this outside of sports, which we’ve seen taking place already. (By ‘this’, I mean, bringing content creators into the workflow, rather than outsourcing a layer of marketing to them). It applies just as well to IP holders who aren't live-rights holders.

We saw an early version of this in Edition 66, when Banijay Entertainment launched its Creators Lab with YouTube funding creators up to €50,000 apiece to reinvent classic French TV formats like Minute To Win It and Got To Dance for a digital audience.

The framing then was that legacy IP holders should treat creators as co-developers, not just distributors, and that giving them the keys to a dusty library is an economical way to find out if it still has an audience before committing to a full-scale relaunch.

More recently, Lionsgate launched their official fan club, bringing fans in as creators to raise awareness and engagement in their film IP, as we wrote about in Edition 114. It’s an expansion of their existing strategy, built on the knowledge that creators are already doing their marketing work, just without the official guardrails.

By handing creators access, you’re also levelling up their output without diluting what makes content creators so valuable in the first place: their specific audience niche.

It’s a point that Ubisoft’s Managing Director of Film and TV, Hélène Juguet, makes in our upcoming episode of The Speakeasy, so be sure to tune in on Thursday to hear her insight. 

It’s hard not to argue in favour of legacy, whether that’s media or sports clubs or brands, as a shorthand for trustworthiness. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case anymore.

As we covered last week, younger audiences are increasingly routing their trust through creators and community spaces rather than a brand's own channel, which is exactly the gap the AFL closed by handing Gorringe official access instead of asking fans to choose between the two.

The reason creators like Gorringe have this dedicated fanbase, fans that may choose him over traditional distributors, is because they’re always on, building that audience year-round, not just during match time as MTKG’s Amar Singh said at SEG3 London.

Of course, this all worked precisely because Gorringe already had the audience and the credibility inside AFL fandom specifically. The AFL didn't manufacture a creator relationship from nothing. We’ve talked a lot about authenticity and fit, and the AFL nailed it with Gorringe.

One of the things I love doing after I watch a film, and even after I review one, is to see what other critics think. I peruse TikTok and go to the social profiles of other writers I admire and see where our reviews match up, and where we diverge.

This impulse is the same one that AFL is acknowledging and strategising around.

AFL's real innovation was giving him this “official match vision”, as they say. They didn’t just anoint him as ‘official’, they gave him the tools to serve his audience better.

This goes against the instinct to protect access and license out the rest: the merchandising, the highlights package, the social clips etc.

But the AFL's numbers suggest the more valuable thing to hand over might be the access itself - treating a trusted creator as a co-author of the official record.

This might feel like a scary leap, but with the right creator, and smart positioning alongside traditional media partners, the results can clearly be worth it.

Too Lost will route its catalogue, including The All-American Rejects, Alex Warren and Teddy Swims, directly into Roblox.

TL:DR

Why you should care

Too Lost distributes for DIY artists, but the roster here is stacked with acts who already have chart pedigree: The All-American Rejects, Alex Warren, Teddy Swims, A$AP Ferg. None of them needs discovering in the traditional sense.

What this does do is deepen engagement, bringing their music into virtual worlds where it may not otherwise live. It also creates an access stream for new fans to discover these artists… aka, younger fans who may not remember the brilliance of ‘Swing Swing’ or ‘Gives You Hell’ (*sighs in millennial*).

The timing is almost too perfect for us newsletter writers. This lands not long after Live Nation and Livewire's Music Festival Tycoon went live on Roblox, which we covered last week. Live Nation says they’ve already drawn more than 3.5 million visits and 23 million in-game performances.

Though the deals are very different, there’s an underlying similarity in strategy. Roblox isn't assembling one-off artist activations. Instead, it’s getting catalogue-level access with a live events giant and a distributor in the same month. This is about Roblox diversifying as much as it is legacy music rights holders hunting for new audiences.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!