It's no secret that in mainstream media caters to sports fans all over the world with countless headlines about teams and coaches that gain thousands of views per day. However, it's also no secret that you tend to not see articles and videos about performing arts or visual arts. With both of these things quite obvious in today's media, it calls into question, why?
A short answer to this dilemma and question is that sports is a way to get quick and easy views without too much work. For insance, platforms like Facebook and TikTok amass millions of views alone, by just posting clips of sports plays that people want to see. According to Shira Ovide, "TikTok and Facebook aren’t paying anything for most of the videos or posts that we spend hours surfing." The countless hours lost in these apps make us want to watch more, and this is a main reason of why sports is so heavily broadcasted to viewers.
While some would argue that art is just as important or even more important than sports in media, the fact is that companies commercialize sports, as they can make more money off it. Pinterest, however, an arts based app with about 400 million users is a very good example of how art is very present in today's world. However, this is smaller than some apps like instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. With billions of sports fans all over the globe, these apps are designed to give you what you want, to keep feeding media of your interest into your recommended pages, and that is why these companies do so well, is because they satisify the needs of their users.
Even in my own life, I can spend countless hours looking at different sports videos, clips, highlights, fails, and not even realize that the time has gone by. However, while I do enjoy these things, I have noticed for a long time that once you view the same things over and over, it is much harder to discover other things on these apps. For instance, if you watch a lot of sports clips everyday, it is quite unlikely that you will ever come across something about cooking, or theater, or music, etc.
Even here at ISB, and as a writer and editor for Panthernation, we can see how our viewership varies for different articles. Things like sports season recaps, and IASAS articles always seem to do very well, and sometimes our articles in the Arts and Entertainment section seem to be less viewed. This is because of the audience that we have for these articles. While im not saying that we are an exclusive mainstream media outlet, one can surely draw the conclusion that it has as strong correlation to what happens on the vast internet. That conclusion is that more people are interested in headlines for sports, as outlets have made it so easy to view, and so addicting.
In this growing day and age, the things we see online are strategies to get people to click. Companies now revolve around clicks. This is not to say however, that the arts are not important, however sports are used as more of a market. Saying this however, I think that art needs to be more present in the media, as it is very important for culture, especially now in a time of political and social chaos.