published on in celeb

How pro bull riding rose from paying to be on TV to becoming a CBS mainstay

The dizzying array of U.S. television channels and streaming services offer a diverse range of alternative sports and competitions, from bowling to darts to cornhole.

One that has evolved over the past 30 years from a sport that had to pay for airtime on network TV to now landing healthy media rights payments and audiences of a million or more viewers is Professional Bull Riders.

Advertisement

The Pueblo, Colo.-based organization has perhaps one of the most literal names in sports: PBR was formed by the top professional bull riders in 1992 in an effort to create a better, more sustainable organization than existed at the time on the rodeo circuit.

“They believed bull riding could exist as a standalone sport,” said Sean Gleason, CEO of Professional Bull Riders Inc. since 2015 and an executive with the circuit since 2000.

They were right.

PBR’s competition began in 1993, airing tape-delayed on cable, and has since grown to become a multi-circuit structure with domestic and international competitions that have broadcast, cable and streaming deals for events that play out in sold-out venues such as Madison Square Garden.

The top PBR series — the Unleash the Beast Series that takes its name from title sponsor Monster Beverage Corp. — runs from November to May. The season culminates with the World Finals at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, which began May 12 and ends this coming Sunday. Coverage is mostly on CBS Sports Network but also on CBS itself at 1 p.m. Sunday.

The recent opening weekend of the finals on CBS averaged about 700,000 viewers for the 1 p.m. live event broadcast window, and this Sunday’s finals broadcast should meet or exceed the 1 million viewers who watched the finals a year ago (which were on CBS Sports Network, which isn’t publicly Nielsen rated).

While the number of U.S. households using linear television dwindles, PBR has managed to keep its audiences relatively flat. The 10 PBR events on CBS heading into the finals this year averaged 864,000 viewers, down only slightly from last season’s 866,000-viewer average for nine events over the equivalent period. Five PBR events on CBS in 2023 topped 1 million viewers heading into the finals.

The bull riding broadcasts have also enjoyed growth in some of the key age demographics sought by advertisers, such as being up 22 percent year over year in adults ages 18-34 and up 11 percent in adults 18-49. They’re not huge numbers — the adults 18-49 growth was 160,000 viewers this year from 143,000 per event last year — but contextually it’s the trend PBR and its media partners want to see.

Advertisement

It managed to grow viewership by 8 percent year over year in 2020 when the pandemic had roiled most with cancellations and delays that sapped audience numbers. PBR kept up its live events during that period.

“It earned us a lot of new fans,” Gleason said.

So how did it become a solidly performing sports property outside of the major leagues?

The newly formed bull riding organization inked a media rights deal in 1993 with a small production company to get the circuit on what was then The Nashville Network — and it was basically a lifetime contract that PBR leadership later had to buy back with the help of new investors and taking on debt in an effort to grow the organization’s exposure.

That early home on TNN, which aired outdoors programming such as hunting and fishing along with auto racing, gave the sport the early boost it needed. And it was getting modest payments to be on cable from the start.

“There was a lot of crossover interest from fans of outdoors sports and NASCAR,” Gleason said. “That was probably the reason PBR was able to succeed.”

As TNN changed format and rebranded to what became Spike TV, the bull-riding sport needed a better fit. So from 2000 to 2012, PBR was buying airtime on broadcast networks such as NBC, CBS and Fox while maintaining ownership of its inventory and selling its airtime that it packaged into sponsorship deals. PBR events also aired on Fox, ESPN and ESPN2 over the years, too.

“We aired on whatever network would give us the right time and place,” Gleason said.

PBR’s rise from paying for airtime to landing rights-fee deals is “rare but not impossible” says one sports TV industry expert. The top series’ finals air this weekend on CBS. (Cindy Ord / Getty Images)

PBR landed primarily on cable’s Outdoor Life Network, later known as Versus and then NBC Sports Network.

It still had to buy airtime on the major broadcast channels, but as audiences grew, the cost for PBR went down. Early on, PBR spent about $350,000 per hour of network airtime but then that dropped to about $250,000 an hour.

Advertisement

PBR eventually split its cable events among NBCSN and CBS Sports Network, with all events moving to CBS platforms in 2012 — which is when PBR and the network ironed out a more traditional media rights relationship, which paid PBR for all of its event content.

In April 2019, PBR and CBS inked a media rights extension through 2028. Terms were not disclosed.

PBR lucked into perfect timing: It launched as cable was exploding in reach and matured as the internet helped give rise to technologies such as live streaming and competition for content, particularly live sports that are more resistant to cord-cutting.

It’s not an easy template to follow, industry insiders say, but it can be done.

“It’s rare but not impossible for new sports properties to work their way up the television ladder. Time buys or revenue-sharing deals often can be television tryouts for sports that need to demonstrate their viability,” said longtime TV industry and sports media rights consultant Lee Berke. “Poker took that approach years ago, and pickleball may be trying to do the same.”

Perhaps most important to PBR’s evolution was a change in ownership: Los Angeles-based Endeavor — the powerful sports management agency known at the time as WME-IMG, and which also owns WWE and UFC — bought PBR in 2015 for a reported $100 million-plus. That immediately gave the bull riding organization, which has about 200-plus events for about 800 riders annually across all of its circuits, access to a deep Rolodex of sports and entertainment connections and potential corporate and media partners.

“The opportunity to be part of a bigger company has given us the latitude to take some risks,” Gleason said. “We have more flexibility to push the envelope.”

PBR was able to buy its own production trucks and equipment and staff to produce all of its own events, meaning the network pays for a finished product to put on the air. PBR’s broadcast production is led by noted veteran TV producer David Neal.

Advertisement

“Endeavor gave us the flexibility to bring production in-house,” Gleason said. Endeavor had $5.2 billion in total revenue last year, including $1.3 billion for its owned sports properties, but its public filings don’t break out financials by individual segments like PBR.

The bull riding circuit relied on ticket sales and corporate sponsorships for about 80 percent of revenue until about 2015, after which media rights became about a third of the revenue pie, with tickets and corporate deals each also a third, Gleason said.

Before longtime sponsor Monster took over the naming rights of PBR’s top series in 2018, it was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and by Ford Motor Co. Monster is among 30 corporate sponsors PBR has this season, including 11 that have signed on since 2020, according to Sports Business Journal. That includes Union Home Mortgage, Kubota, Tractor Supply Co. and Bass Pro Shops.

Outside of the competition broadcasts themselves, PBR has made moves to stay apace with changing consumer habits and has sought to broaden its appeal with fresh marketing — it recently hired actor Cole Hauser, who plays Rip Wheeler in the popular drama “Yellowstone,” as the face of a new ad campaign.

It also has turned its major events into festival-style spectacles with music concerts, celebrities, kids events, a women’s rodeo, exhibits, etc. And the last two rounds of the 2024 finals competition will be held at AT&T Stadium near Dallas next May. The venue saw a PBR attendance record of 46,000 attendees for a 2018 event.

PBR also launched its own subscription streaming service in 2018 called RidePass but in 2021 navigated it to Paramount-owned Pluto TV, which is a free ad-supported 24-7 streaming channel.

“For us, that’s a very important mechanism to reach our audience,” Gleason said.

Advertisement

Like auto racing, golf, and other sports, PBR has a developmental circuit known as the Velocity Tour. And last year, it launched a team series for which it sold franchises to investors.

The team series is the focus of a new eight-part docuseries on Amazon Prime Video called “The Ride” that is a behind-the-scenes look at the riders, coaches, and executives involved, not unlike Netflix’s “Formula 1: Drive To Survive” series that’s credited for helping boost F1’s U.S. popularity. The PBR series debuts May 30.

“We think it’s going to do the same thing for our sport as it has for Formula One and others,” Gleason said.

Beyond television, PBR continues to be popular as a live spectator sport. The circuit set 39 attendance records this season, Gleason said, and enjoyed numerous sellouts. Last year, it topped 1 million attendees for the first time.

“We’re seeing growth across all aspects of the sport,” he said.

PBR isn’t just a tour aimed at rural markets. Stops among its 24 events this season included New York City (Madison Square Garden), Chicago (Allstate Arena) and Los Angeles (Crypto.com Arena). Two of the three event nights at MSG were sellouts.

“It’s a completely different crowd than Billings, Montana,” Gleason said. “Our audience is very diverse in terms of demographics and psychographics. It varies from L.A. to Albuquerque. We try and adopt a product message, a marketing message, as universal as can be when you’re selling cowboys riding bulls.”

Jose Vitor Leme Brazil’s Jose Vitor Leme — the top series’ champion in 2020 and 2021 — celebrates winning the New York event this year. Most of the best riders hail from Brazil or the U.S. (Elsa / Getty Images)

Reigning world champion is 23-year-old western New York native Daylon Swearingen, who already has $2.4 million in career winnings, while the 2020 and 2021 top rider was Brazil’s Jose Vitor Leme, who at age 26 is third in career PBR winnings at $5.7 million. Americans and Brazilians have dominated the sport and are almost always the top-ranked riders annually.

Advertisement

Still, PBR exists as a lower-tier sports property in a sports TV universe dominated by the NFL and other major pro and college sports leagues. PBR has carved out its profitable niche, but further growth always is a slog in a crowded marketplace.

“There are times when I feel like we’re the Rodney Dangerfield of sports, and get no respect,” Gleason said, chuckling. “It takes a little longer to get the attention of traditional broadcasters that are enamored with football, baseball, basketball, etc.”

Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned media consultant, said PBR as a sports TV property is in the same general space today as the WNBA and National Hot Rod Association, and mirrors a growth story like UFC.

“For a long time it was doing kick-ass without a rights fee,” Crakes said. “Clearly, there was a market here. They were able to develop it. Promotion has been run correctly.”

While how much CBS is paying PBR hasn’t been disclosed, it’ll be modest compared to what the network pays for the NFL, college football and basketball and golf. And that’s a positive in an era when broadcasters are seeking to trim costs.

“There are a lot of lower-tier sports that make good money,” Crakes said. “It’s a hell of a success story in sports media.”

When CBS announced its media rights extension with the bull riders, the network characterized how important PBR has become for its lineup.

“PBR has been a cornerstone partner within the CBS Sports family for almost a decade. It is an anchor property for CBS Sports Network and consistently delivers a strong, dedicated audience,” said Dan Weinberg, executive vice president of programming for CBS Sports, in the 2019 statement.

Could PBR follow other sports by putting some or all live events and content exclusively behind a streaming paywall? The intersection of broadcast, cable and digital delivery is certainly on PBR and Endeavor’s radar, but it’s wait-and-see for now because of the long-term deal with CBS (which puts all PBR events on its Paramount+ service).

Advertisement

“Our job is to build an audience that will tune in, engage and respond,” Gleason said. “Our primary purpose as the PBR is to serve that audience.”

The risk of losing audience by doing too much paywalled content is a concern as the sport tries to broaden its overall growth. Gleason believes the current strategies and tactics with marketing, media partners, event production, etc., are working and will continue to work.

“We’re winning the hearts and minds of new fans,” he said. “We’re going to do more of the same we’ve been doing for 30 years but will add octane.”

(Top photo of Jose Vitor Leme, competing in January at Madison Square Garden: Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k25pcmxia3xzfJFsZmltX2aFcLzRqJ2eq6OevK%2Bty2aZrqScYr%2BqsMSrqmabkqh6tcKO