This year 480K people attended the British GP, setting the record for the most attended British GP in history. This was a big increase compared to the 340K attendance in 2018.
Formula 1 has never been more popular. The 2023 season saw an average of 1.11 million viewers per race, which essentially doubled the average from 2018, which was around 554K. Now if you think about it, that’s only a five year difference we’re talking about. So what could possibly be the reason for such changes in numbers?
The answer is social media. But what is the secret behind it? How can something so ordinary have such an important impact on the sport?
Well the purpose of social media is giving the audience access to engage and communicate with various communities from their own devices. With the rise of social media usage many of those communities saw an opportunity to present themselves to many of those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to discover them.
F1 and the teams took the chance not only to expand the sport to those who weren’t able to watch the races live or through TV, but also to create more additional content to keep the fans that were already watching intrigued. The content was essentially focused on the drivers, off the track, doing things that weren’t necessarily connected with racing. Seeing the drivers without their race suits on, made fans feel closer to the teams and their drivers. They would find even more reasons to keep up with the sport throughout the full season. Because of that viewership increased and so did the profit, meaning more money was put into the sport. And with more money put into the sport, they were able to make big technological advancements which increased the experience and the quality of the sport.
On social media, a whole community started to form. All those people had one thing in common. Their love for the sport. Many of them started to create content of their own, which led to more people discovering the sport. A whole chain was formatted and F1 kept gaining more and more fans.
To this day the F1 keeps gaining numerous fans through social media and social media is currently the main reason for the sports popularity and it’s current peak.
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