The Indian Premier League attracts a lot of eyeballs – and advertisers pay a pretty penny to get their share.
The IPL, over the last decade, has become one of India’s premier entertainment extravaganzas. It’s a money spinner – IPL’s revenues for increased from Rs. 400 crore in 2008, to Rs. 1,100 crore last year. The revenue comes from several sources – ticket sales, partnerships, and crucially, television ad spots.
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IPL’s revenue over the years
The IPL this year will feature 56 league games, and four other games, including the final. Each IPL match has around 2300 seconds of ad inventory which is carved out of the breaks between overs and the presentations. The rates for an IPL ad are in 10 second slots, and depend on the amount of inventory the company commits to buying. A title sponsor, such as Vivo, commits to buying a minimum of 300 seconds every match, and pays Rs. 5.2 lakh a second. Smaller partners with lower commitments pay Rs. 5.75 lakh every 10 seconds, while spot buys of ads cost Rs. 6 lakh every 10 seconds.
Which means that a 30 second commercial can cost as much as Rs. 18 lakh for a single run during an IPL game. Also, with 230 ten second ad slots to fill, the IPL rakes in over 12 crore in ads per IPL match. With 60 matches scheduled, the IPL makes nearly Rs. 720 crore from television ads alone.
IPL, for its part, needs to ensure that it maintains the high level of viewership and interest that it had seen in the first few seasons. There have been several reports that TRPs are falling, even though the BCCI claims otherwise. When it had started in 2008, IPL was the first Indian league of its kind, but its success has spawned several competitors – there are IPL-like leagues for football, and hockey, and even kabaddi and wrestling have their own televised competitions. IPL, though, is the top of the totem pole at the moment – and has the top-dollar ad rates to show for it.