High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / recommendation

Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: recommendation

27 Jan 2026 Acquired The NFL

“We think you should just compete against each other until your margins are zero, and we're going to accrue all the profit pool now, because there's basically nothing else that you'll put on that people want to watch.”

— Ben Gilbert

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
27 Jan 2026
Publisher
Acquired
Episode
The NFL

Transcript context

…That's a great question. My first instinct is to say, I think it's scarcity value in that I don't think there's in the modern media world, anywhere else except live football, where you can hit a huge amount of people all at once across demographics. Yep, I think that's definitely part of it. Another argument would be, well, they're finding a way to put more ad slots into the same amount of media, but that's not true. They've actually held flat, or in some cases, even decreased the number of commercials over the last 15 years in NFL broadcasts. You're thinking, okay, the audience size is about the same. The number of ad slots is about the same. What else could be going on here? I think part of it is your right is that the networks are quickly getting into a place where they're like, we don't really have any other content that people want to watch, We kinda need this no matter what. And that advantage is the NFL and the negotiation where they come in and they say, look, I know you used to be super profitable on buying these rights from us, and then your business on the back end was selling all these advertisements against it. We think you should just compete against each other until your margins are zero, and we're going to accrue all the profit pool now, because there's basically nothing else that you'll put on that people want to watch. I think that's probably right. For those networks, for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football. They don't exist anymore. ] This has been life support for them for a decade.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence