BreakingT’s NIL Top 25, Explained

A CrowdBreak Case Study

"Is this moment shirt-worthy?"

CrowdBreak™, BreakingT's proprietary social listening platform, analyzes millions of social media posts every minute, in an attempt to catch the next big thing that sports fans care about.  More specifically, it's measuring fan engagement and consumer sentiment associated with on-field and off-field moments in sports, as they unfold in real-time.

CrowdBreak helps our product team answer the question, "Is this moment shirt-worthy?", over and over, at scale, across every professional and collegiate sports team fan base in the U.S.

CrowdBreak's algorithm clusters social data by team, establishes baseline engagement within each market, and then normalizes each dataset across all markets. The algorithm is tuned to look for things that would work well as licensed sports merchandise, and is constantly comparing them to each other, resulting in CrowdBreak's ever-changing "Heat Index".

This is BreakingT's AI, the tireless sports analyst robot feeding us insights that drive every single product launch.

Sharing our insights

During an all-hands meeting earlier in the year, we decided to make an effort to start publishing some of the insights that we learn from CrowdBreak.  These insights are mission critical to our daily business, but we also think they're often interesting as sports fans.  For example, on any given day, CrowdBreak can tell you what Green Bay Packers fans are most excited about, how MLB fan bases stack rank against each other in terms of recent engagement, and who the top 10 most beloved NHL players in the Metropolitan Division of the Eastern Conference are at the moment.

Here comes NIL

In July, when the NCAA officially cleared the way for collegiate athletes to commercialize their NIL (Name, Image, Likeness), we launched our RAMP licensing program to provide an opportunity for athletes to earn royalties on products that feature their likeness, inspired by the biggest moments in college sports.

As part of this effort, we invested in further developing and fine-tune calibrating CrowdBreak for college sports. Our AWS server costs went up, but it was worth it.

BreakingT's College Football NIL Top 25

When the start of the college football season rolled around, we saw an opportunity to follow-up on the decision we had made at the all-hands meeting earlier in the year.  We looked at different ways to summarize the mountain of insights that CrowdBreak delivered to us each college football Saturday.

We landed on "BreakingT's Weekly College Football NIL Top 25", a ranking of the top 25 most "merch-able" college athletes as determined by CrowdBreak's algorithm.  If an athlete makes the list, it means not only are they making big plays on the field and fans are engaging with their content on social media, but also most importantly, consumers in their markets are ripe for purchasing licensed fan gear featuring their NIL at an above-average conversion rate.

CrowdBreak tracks over 100 schools and thousands of athletes, and there are many honorable mentions, but only 25 NIL stars make the list each week.