A good three and a half months after the end of the season, the Media Report for the SkiSprung World Cup 2024/25 is now available. This shows the development of the TV market and the visual behavior of the fans and makes comparisons to the pre-season. While men’s ski jumping continues to lose viewers, women’s and mixed competitions are becoming increasingly interested. But that’s not the only striking trend.
Ski jumping has had an almost turbulent season. While the Austrians in particular dominated the ski jumps, the sport also made large negative headlines through the material scandal at the World Cup in Trondheim.
Insiders therefore waited all the more excited for the media report for the winter of 2024/2025. This appears annually and is created by the research and consulting company Nielsen and published by the FIS skiing association. The latest version of this market analysis extended over more than 50 countries and included numerous new markets and streaming offers for the first time, which made the data collected even higher quality.
Providers such as the US platform ‘Skiandsnowboard.Live’ have so far only made around 0.5 percent of the total range, but have significant growth rates in several markets (especially Scandinavia and North America) and undisputedly have the greatest growth potential.
New TV record for the ski jump circus
In the 2024/25 season, over 25,000 TV programs with ski jumping were broadcast worldwide-almost twice as many as in the previous season. The total time of the day rose by 151 percent to more than 22,000 hours, a record value. While this also increased visibility (+158 percent), sponsorship revenue decreased by 8 percent and was 27.6 million euros.
The global cumulative spectator range also fell by 16 percent to 1.55 billion. Likewise, the event impressions (broadcasting times divided into millions by 30 seconds, editor’s note) declined by nine percent to almost 61 billion. The report explains this supposed contradiction by expanding the monitoring scope: many, partly new, new, low spectator binding were recorded for the first time, which put the total numbers into perspective.
The schedule in the men’s World Cup also had a special impact: the number of competitions in 2023/2024 was still 39, because of the deadline for the appointment, it was only 33, which was reflected directly in the range of reach. Event impression decreased by 14 percent to almost 51 billion. The decline in Poland (-22 percent) was particularly strong, which was mainly related to the weak results of the Polish jumper. In Germany and Austria, on the other hand, media interest remained largely stable, partly with slight growth in media impact per competition (+3 percent in Austria, +5 percent in Germany).
Quota hit remains a four-hill tour
The seasonal highlights were absolutely quota hits. The four -hill tour continued to generate the highest values. Overall, the number of live viewers of the tour increased by 6 percent compared to the pre-season. In Austria, the figures even shot by 41 percent due to the triple triumph by Daniel Tschofenig, Jan Hörl and Stefan Kraft-a unique event so far. Even the qualifications as part of the tour attracted an average of 5.8 million viewers, qualifications in the remaining course of the season only got average to 0.8 million.
The RAW-Air tour in Norway slightly recorded ranges under the previous year’s level, but aroused significantly more media and spectator interest than as a result of the material scandal at the Nordic Ski World Cup in Trondheim, which occurred just a few days earlier. The World Cup itself is not taken into account in the media report because it does not belong to the World Cup and is therefore not part of the analysis.
Women’s ski jumping particularly popular in Germany
The Women’s World Cup, however, recorded a very positive development. The media presence increased by 24 percent, the spectator range by 19 percent. Growth in Germany (+22 percent), China (especially through the first World Cup jumping in Zhangjiakou) and Poland, where mixed team events caused a significant increase were particularly outstanding.
The trend was only shown in Japan: the reporting was expanded there, but the number of spectators went down by a whopping 36 percent, which was also reflected in a decrease in event impression by 13 percent. Analogous to Poland, this was also related to the absence of the top results of their own compatriots.
A clear spectator plus of two million viewers, on the other hand, recorded the Two-Nights tour around the turn of the year and made it clear how valuable the assignment of this dates for ski jumping is. With one exception, these remained completely unused in the Women’s World Cup in the 2010s and were therefore proof of unused potential.
Overall, women’s and mixed competitions achieved 16 percent of the total media impact of the SkiSprung World Cup, here the increasing number of competitions held was particularly noticeable compared to the pre-season.
Germany’s most important TV market for ski jumping
The most important single TV market for the SkiSprung World Cup is and remains Germany. ARD and ZDF generated 43 percent of the entire media impact. The public broadcasters claimed their top position despite a slight decline in the average viewers for live broadcasts from 2.87 to 2.67 million. Eurosport, now active in all European markets, was by far most of the broadcast time, but only reached around 7 percent of the cumulative spectator range.
In the event impression, too, Germany (28.5 billion) clearly led to Poland (16.1), Austria (4.1), Slovenia (3.5) and Finland (1.2). Markets such as China, Norway and Switzerland, who themselves have World Cup, showed increasing range of reach, while countries such as France and Italy, in which no World Cups took place, had more stagnating or declining tendencies.
Despite the decline in the overall range, the SkiSprung World Cup claimed its importance compared to other winter sports competition series. The study by Nielsen Sports showed that the season highlights such as the four-hill tour as well as the continuously increasing interest in women’s and mixed competitions are central factors for the media future of ski jumping. In the coming years, the growing importance of new markets and digital transmission paths will be particularly crucial in order to maintain the range and relevance of the sport or to increase at best.