And how do fans consume disc golf content?
February 5, 2025 by Jesse Weisz and Josiah Zoodsma in Analysis
The disc golf media landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade. Ten years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find coverage of even the most important events in the sport. Now we can watch post-produced coverage from events worldwide on YouTube and high-quality live coverage of events from around the world.
This article will focus on the data we gathered on disc golf media, as well as ancillary questions about how closely individuals follow the sport and opinions on central institutions. If you would like to learn more about the survey and the demographics of the respondents, please read this accompanying article.
How does the disc golf community consume professional disc golf coverage? We asked survey respondents who indicated they followed the professional side of the sport, which of these ways they have consumed the professional side of the game in the last year:
Professional Watching Percentage
- Over 85% of respondents watched some post-produced coverage on YouTube, and almost 65% identified that they watched live coverage on DGN.
- To our surprise, 41.6% of respondents identified as having watched professional disc golf in person. Having seen this, we were curious about how the DGPT schedule may have influenced state-by-state in-person attendance. To explore this further, we analyzed the percent of respondents from each state who attended an event.
Percent respondents who went in person for each state
- Unsurprisingly, states without tour stops had the lowest percentage of in-person attendance.
- One of the most densely populated regions of the United States, the stretch of the I-95 corridor between New York and Washington, D.C., did not have any DGPT or Major events within a three-hour drive. Pennsylvania (where both authors of this article happen to reside) had the 6th most respondents take the Fandom Survey, but ranked 37th for percentage of respondents who had attended a professional disc golf event. Southern California is another densely populated region without any tour events.
- Vermont, Oregon, Iowa, and Massachusetts had the four highest attendance percentages, which all held tour stops.
- We also looked at in-person attendance among individual countries. Compared to 42.7% of US-based respondents, 56.5% of Finnish respondents attended a professional disc golf event in person. However, this pales in comparison to Estonia, who had 81.5% of respondents having attended a live event within the past 12 months. Shout out to our Estonian respondents!
Returning to viewing habits, we asked respondents what percentage of their time watching professional disc golf was spent on each platform. Here are the platforms that each respondent indicated they watched the most in the past year:
- Post-produced coverage on Youtube (41%) narrowly edged out live coverage on DGN (39%).
- Notably, if you sum all of this graph’s “post-produced” and “live content” components, it is nearly tied! 51% post-produced was the predominant way of viewing professional disc golf coverage compared to 49% live coverage or in-person.
- We asked a similar question in 2022 and 2023, with results that can be found here. For example, in 2023, 55% of respondents either outright preferred live coverage or leaned toward preferring live.
While the “most watched method” is informative, many of us consume professional disc golf coverage content in more than one way. If we break down all the professional disc golf content consumed across all survey respondents, the following graph is the percentage of time watched on each of these platforms
time does the average survey respondent consume for each media type?
Few of us have the bandwidth and time to watch every single disc golf event. Outside of when our schedules allow, what influences our decision to watch specific events? For this question, we asked respondents to rank which of 8 factors influenced their decision most of which events they watched. Here, lower ranks indicate that the reasoning was more influential in their decision.
- This graph displays the average ranking for each factor. The percentage of respondents identifying the factor as the most important (rank 1) or in their Top 3 are accessible if you hover over the individual bars.
- To our surprise, ‘Who is playing’ was the most important factor for respondents in their decision to watch an event, even above the tier of the event.
We also asked respondents what year they started following professional disc golf.
Number of survey respondents beginning to follow professional disc golf each year
- For most of disc golf’s history, following the professional level as a fan was difficult. The primary access points were VHS cassettes, DVDs, Magazines, online forums, etc.
- As we entered the digital age, YouTube Channels such as Disc Golf Monthly (beginning in 2006), The Disc Golf Guy (2010), Central Coast Disc Golf (2011), McFlySoHigh (2012), Jomez Pro (2012), Spin TV (2013), Gatekeeper Media (2017), and GK Pro (2018) made pro coverage free to watch and easy to find. Live coverage from Disc Golf Planet, Smashboxx, and eventually Disc Golf Network (DGN) were also significant forces.
- Largely caused by the COVID pandemic, 2020 saw an unprecedented number of new players and fans, both playing and watching.
- In the years since this unprecedented growth, there has been a slowing of new fans to the sport, but it is worth noting that the newest fans may be less likely to find and/or take this survey.
The 2024 DGPT schedule included 28 events. Over the course of these events, there were 17 different individuals who commentated on at least one MPO or FPO round. The breakdown of their appearances is summarized below:
DGN Commentator Appearances in 2024
- Ian Anderson (10 MPO, 8 FPO events) and Terry Miller (7 MPO, 8 FPO events) appeared the most often in 2024.
- 11 of the 18 commentators only called for one division:
- MPO – Brathwaite, Doss, Sexton, Perkins, Koling, and Climo
- FPO – Jenkins, Korver, AnDyke, Hokom, and Reading
We asked survey respondents which commentators they had listened to, which is summarized here. For commentators that the respondents indicated they had listened to in the past year, we then asked on a scale from 0 to 10, how much they enjoyed their commentary. The following graph includes average responses for both live (DGN) and post-produced (JomezPro) commentators.
Rate the commentary of the following disc golf media members
- Nate Sexton remains at the top with the highest average score in Commentary Fandom. Although we individually asked respondents to rate his live and post-produced commentary, both values averaged 8.9 out of 10. Similarly, Jeremy Koling had comparable Commentary Fandom Scores for live and post-produced media.
- Not including JomezPro commentators, Brian Earhart and Ken Climo garnered the highest-rated Commentary Fandom Scores for solely live broadcasters. Climo only commented at Chess.com last year, but perhaps with the start of his disc brand, he will also be in the booth more often.
How do these Commentary Fandom Scores compare to last year?
Change in Commentary Fandom Score
- Nearly all commentators saw a bump in Fandom Score when comparing 2024 to 2023, with the most significant increase seen for Nate Doss, who rose 1.4 points!
- This could be for a variety of reasons: (1) Commentary across the board is continuously improving; (2) This survey iteration screened out respondents who had never heard a commentator’s work, thus resulting in less apathetic responses; and/or (3) Differences in the survey population between the two years.
- Sexton was the only commentator who did not see an increase in average score. It is hard to score any higher than last year, but he did manage to have the same score of 8.9.
There are other sources of disc golf media that aren’t directly linked to professional disc golf coverage. We asked respondents which platforms they consume disc golf content and how frequently. That is reflected in the chart below.
What platforms do you consume other disc golf content on and how frequently do you use them?
- Nearly all respondents (98%) indicated they consume disc golf content on YouTube. More respondents indicated that they consume disc golf content daily on YouTube (60.7%) than on any other platform at any frequency.
- More than half of the respondents indicated that they consumed disc golf content on Instagram and podcasts.
Since the start of the Fandom Survey in 2022, we have asked a few questions each year to quantify changes over time. How happy are respondents with the governing institutions of our sport? We asked respondents what they thought of the PDGA and DGPT.
What do you think of the DGPT and PDGA?
- The average rating for the DGPT and PDGA was 8.00 and 6.40, respectively, in 2023. In 2024, the DGPT averaged 7.68 and the PDGA averaged 6.57, indicating that the DGPT’s approval slightly declined and the PDGA approval slightly improved, but both largely stayed in the same ballpark.
How closely do you follow the MPO? FPO?
How closely do respondents follow MPO and FPO
- As was the case last year, this year’s respondents followed MPO more closely than FPO; 79.3% of respondents indicated that they follow MPO disc golf very closely, giving scores of 8-10, while only 49.9% of the respondents indicated they follow FPO very closely. This is largely in line with the values from 2023 (81.3% and 46.1%), but suggests there was a slight decrease in how closely our respondents followed MPO and a slight increase in how closely they followed FPO.
Are you following disc golf more or less closely than in 2023?
Compared to last year, how closely are you following professional disc golf?
- 41.7% of respondents indicated that they are following disc golf more closely in 2024 compared to 2023 while 17.8% of respondents are following disc golf less closely. The most frequent answer, both this year and last year, was that respondents follow roughly the same amount; 40.6% of respondents indicated they were following disc golf roughly the same as they did in 2023.
- More respondents said they were following disc more closely in 2023 compared to the previous year (49.2%) and marginally fewer said they were following disc golf less closely (17.1%).
- This question is certainly skewed because the less you follow disc golf, the less likely you are to know about the survey and fill it out. Also, our respondent pool was broader in 2024 compared to 2023, which could also be a factor in the change.
What other questions about disc golf media and commentators are you interested in? Let us know using the feedback links below! In the next article in the series we will look at how fans feel about the courses on tour.
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to be notified of the publication of future articles in this series and/or want to take future disc golf surveys from our group, click here!
- If you have any questions, comments or mailbag topics for future articles, submit them here!
Special thanks to Lauren Campbell, who was instrumental in developing our research plan and assisting with survey design. Also, thanks go out to the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Please see the full series of 2024 articles by following these links:
- The Survey Itself & Who Took It
- Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
- What Drives Fans to Root for Certain Players?
- How Fans Feel about Disc Manufacturers
- Fan Relation to Discs
Links for the 2023 and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
