The View from Here: The Business of NASCAR

Glad you found this article it was interesting. After watching the superbowl and learning that it was the second most watched television program of all time I wanted to see how nascar held up. The article says they expect 20 million viewers, which has been about the same give or take a million for the last several runnings of Daytona. The superbowl landed with almost a hundred million viewers and a cost of 2.6 million dollars for 30 seconds of commercials. What the superbowl does (atleast I believe) that nascar does not is push advertising to watch the superbowl. Despite the fact that almost everyone in this country watches to an extent the NFL, football related news stays on espn and other sports stations constantly. Nascar seems not to push this race advertising as hard to the general public. (ex. I had to tell the class when the Daytona 500 was so they knew when we did not have class)If you go to espn.com you see a small tab for nascar with a brief article about the "dream team" of 08, and thats pretty much all of it. So much money is spent on this sport for advertising each car, spend a little of that money to advertise some races, maybe next year 21 million people will watch.

Cameron: Good points. Read an article yesterday about how NASCAR drivers show up more in ads during races (especially Daytona) than football players/coaches, etc. in ads during the Super Bowl. You're on the mark with the NFL hyping the ads--keeps people from channel surfing and possibly missing some of the action. Finally, U.S. football is probably more unique than any other sport we have in this country so it may be logical that the media keeps it in the forefront. Jon