Will People Watch NASCAR on Twitter?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 9:01AM EST · Published Aug 18, 6:30AM EDT

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Will People Watch NASCAR on Twitter? — © Thinkstock

Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) will start to live-stream some NASCAR races. It is hard to see why fans, who have so many other ways to watch the races, would even bother.

NASCAR management said in a press release:

For the first time in the sport’s history, NASCAR will live-stream an in-car camera on Twitter for all 10 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™ Playoffs races in 2017, NASCAR announced today.

Beginning with the first race of the NASCAR Playoffs at Chicagoland Speedway, NASCAR will provide fans a unique look from inside the race car with a live camera stream that can be accessed via its official Twitter handle, @NASCAR, and NASCAR.twitter.com.

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NASCAR races are carried live by two of the largest sports networks in the country: Fox Sports and NBC Sports. For people who do not have or do not want to have a TV, the races can be viewed on the NBC Sports App. The ways NASCAR fans can see the races seem to be covered by both traditional and new media sources.

While attendance has declined, NASCAR competitions are held at 19 race courses across the country. Some of these have seating capacities of over 100,000. So, attendance at the events stretches into seven figures.

Twitter has announced several live events that can be watched on the social network. The most visible of these is the Twitter live-stream of NFL Thursday Night Football. This began in late 2016, and there is no evidence that a large number of fans use it.

Twitter continues to be dogged by the fact that it cannot expand much beyond its traditional tweet platform. While its user number has been stuck at just above 300,000, Twitter is the preferred communication platform of many celebrities and politicians. The first among these is U.S. president, Donald Trump. Even with this level of visibility, Twitter has been unable to turn the audience into revenue.

NASCAR has come to Twitter, but who will watch it? The programs are available too many other places for the announcement to be important.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.