Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere didn't at first seem to have much to do with sports digital strategy?

Until you get to the platforms: Kick. Rumble. A whole ecosystem of streaming channels that the sports business conversation barely mentions, yet where significant numbers of young men are spending serious time.

So we brought in Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital at IMG, to ask: is the industry optimising for the wrong platforms?

What follows is a conversation that starts with Kick and ends somewhere much more interesting: in the weeds of Reddit moderators, Discord quiz nights, Iron Maiden's fan base, and what a thousand true fans is actually worth.

Dan makes a strong case that the non-obvious channels aren't really about reach at all. Reddit and Discord represent a qualitatively different kind of engagement — audience-to-audience, not brand-to-audience — and the sports organisations that understand that distinction are building something that turns out to be genuinely valuable precisely when things go wrong.

There's also a sharp thread running through this about numbers — what a view is worth now that TikTok set the floor at zero seconds, why 15,000 concurrent viewers on a cycling stream is a better result than it sounds, and why the industry's fandom claims may be heading for a Barcelona email database moment.

Dan is a rare guest: someone who's been inside platform change long enough — from Sony Music in the early 2000s through to IMG's YouTube CMS work today — to have real opinions rather than consulting hedges.

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