Studios know their box office. They don't know their fans

Ask a football club how many people watched Saturday's match and the answer comes back in seconds, to the decimal. Ask who those people are, what else they love, how they felt at the final whistle, and what would pull them back on a wet Tuesday in February, and the room goes quiet.

That silence is the most expensive thing in entertainment.

Reach is a headcount, not an understanding

Rights holders across film, television, music and sport sit on mountains of numbers: ratings, box office, streams, ticket sales, gate receipts. It feels like being data-rich, and it gets mistaken for knowing the audience. It is not the same thing. Those numbers count how many and how much. They say almost nothing about who, or why, or what happens in the long stretch when nothing is being sold.

Sport learned this first, because sport has the longest gaps. As far back as 2020, Deloitte found that 95% of fans stay in contact with their team through the off-season, and that those who engage even once a month spend 40% more across the year than fans who go quiet (Deloitte, Engaging sports fans year-round, 2020). The engaged off-season fan is the most valuable fan a club has. Most clubs could not pick that fan out of a crowd.

The relationship happens somewhere they cannot see

Here is why the gap in understanding has widened rather than closed. The place fans actually gather between releases is not owned by the people who own the worlds. It is rented, on social platforms, and what happens there is mostly invisible to the rights holder.

Deloitte's 2026 Digital Media Trends report puts a figure on the leak. 52% of fans, rising to 73% of gen z, now say social platforms are their main way of discovering something to watch (Deloitte Insights, 25 March 2026). Fans find a world on social and then leave to consume it elsewhere, a path Deloitte describes, for streaming services, as one that "often exists as a black box". 44% of fans, and closer to 60% of gen z, take exactly that route (Deloitte Insights, 25 March 2026).

So the audience is more active than it has ever been, and the people who own the stories can see less of it than ever. Third-party signal is vanishing, cookies and all, and when the rented view goes dark, they will be left knowing their numbers and not their fans.

First-party understanding is about to become the scarcest asset in entertainment, because almost nobody has built an honest way to earn it.

This is close to what Matthew Ball calls returns to marginal affinity: the real value in entertainment is the accrued love of the audience, and understanding is what lets you deepen it (matthewball.co).

The part everyone gets wrong

Whenever fan data comes up, the conversation collapses into a false choice. Exploit the fan or protect the fan. Use the data or respect the privacy. Pick one.

That is a failure of design, not a law of nature, and the fix is to stop treating two different things as one. The first is individual identity, the actual person and their relationship with the world they love. That should stay with the rights holder, held in trust, with everyone else acting as a custodian rather than an owner. The second is aggregated, de-identified understanding, the patterns across thousands of fans with no single person visible inside them. That is the layer that can be shared, learned from and built on.

Get that separation right and the false choice disappears: you can be data-rich and privacy-respecting at once. Get it wrong, especially with voice, which carries biometric exposure most rights holders have not begun to think about, and the backlash will be deserved.

The next land grab

For a decade the industry raced for content. More of it, faster, everywhere. The next race is quieter and worth more. It is for understanding: who the fan actually is, what they love, and how to be useful to them in the long gaps when nothing is airing, without betraying them to do it.

The most valuable thing in entertainment is the data nobody is collecting.

Sotto · London · 20.07.26

First published on LBB Online.