How PGA Tour’s new Creator Council will try to grow its ‘next generation’ of fans

When Andy Weitz took over as the PGA Tour’s new chief marketing and communications officer and executive vice president of investor relations in June, there was one topic he immediately wanted to address: How the Tour is connecting with future generations of fans. 

When he saw the Tour had already been putting the wheels in motion for the Creator Classic, he was pleasantly surprised, but Weitz and the Tour are looking to further engage with a burgeoning sect of golf fans that consume the game via social media and YouTube. 

That mission is what led the PGA Tour to announce late last week the creation of the Creators Council, which will be an advisory group made up of some of the most popular and well-known golf content creators on the internet. 

“The question then began, if we have a platform that creators want to come and participate on in that manner…can we develop a more persistent relationship, a dialogue, an ongoing opportunity to learn from them. To get feedback, to co-create and as a result together to more effectively reach and engage our fans,” Weitz told The Post about how the genesis for the idea came about. 

The Creator Council will initially include Bryan Bros Golf, Fore Play/Barstool Sports, Paige Spiranac, Tisha Alyn, Roger Steele, No Laying Up and Erik Anders Lang, and later rotate other creators in. 

The group will meet monthly to discuss future editions of the Creator Classic along with broader initiatives around fan engagement strategies, collaborative content opportunities, PGA Tour media regulations and event/broadcast enhancements.

The Creator Classic had been a nine-hole tournament hosted the day before the PGA Championship in August that featured a number of the top golf content creators and was streamed across the Tour’s various social platforms.

“I think the Creator Council is first and foremost a forum to have these discussions,” Weitz said. “And our goal is to have kind of an open-door, rotating approach to make sure we have the right people at the table that reflect the sentiment of our fans. So we best understand how we can reach them together.”

Reaching fans is always top of mind for any professional sports league, but golf has found itself in a peculiar position with the popularity of the sport on the rise, but the PGA Tour’s audience numbers taking a dip. 

Tour ratings had been down on linear television this year with Sunday telecasts (no majors) averaging 2.2 million viewers, which was down 19 percent from the previous year’s 2.7 million average.

The number did jump to 2.8 for Sunday broadcasts when majors were included this year, Sports Business Journal reported. 

Golf journalist and the editor-at-large at Pro Shop Inc. Dan Rapaport viewed the current state of the Tour’s positioning in the sport as a product of competition with rival league LIV Golf and the explosion of YouTube golf and golf content on social media. 

“The PGA Tour no longer has a monopoly on broadcasting golf, is kind of the way I would put it,” Rapaport said. “But they’re smart. And, and so they see that this is resonating, especially with younger fans.”

It’s hard to ignore the audience and reach that golf’s biggest content creators have garnered during the explosion of popularity online. 

Fore Play Golf’s most recent video of one of its members — Trent Ryan — trying to shoot an 85 at a golf course in Arizona had over 185,000 views in four days since it was posted.

U.S. Open champ Bryson DeChambeau, who has carved out a sizable following in the content creator space, had 100 million views on TikTok during the 16 days he attempted to hit hole-in-one over his house. 

During the summer, the PGA Tour saw firsthand the influence these golf content creators can have on viewership when it hosted the Creator Classic the day before the start of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club. 

According to data provided to The Post, the PGA Tour’s YouTube channel live stream of the event had a total of 2.5 million viewers and the video of the event was the number two video on YouTube for 24 hours.

At the course, the PGA Tour said it saw a 39 percent increase in ticket scans on the Wednesday before the start of the PGA Championship compared to the year prior. 

Weitz also said that the PGA Tour identified the need to work with creators and dive further into the creator space through feedback from their “Fan Forward” initiative it launched in June. 

“We definitely identified that the creator community and YouTube as a platform were building the next generation of fans. A younger generation, a more diverse generation and the data told us that we had an opportunity to learn from that,” Weitz said. 

He called the Creator Classic the Tour’s first step and the creation of the Creator Council the “natural next step” 

“We look at it, there’s an opportunity to learn from those creators in terms of how we connect with fans,” Weitz later said. “And to give them access to our platform, so that our fans see a future where they’re both YouTube followers of their favorite creators and PGA Tour fans. We’re excited about that potential.”

Rapaport, who previously was part of the Fore Play Golf podcast, also saw the Tour’s push into the creator space through a wider lens. 

“I think the PGA Tour is also, you know, just being, being smart about, about hopefully a post-merger world [with LIV],” Rapaport said. “Where if you’ve already started the ball rolling on these sort of initiatives you can hopefully grow it. I think the PGA Tour is being really smart about a long-term vision here about how are we going to capitalize on the momentum that golf has. 

“You hear all of this stuff about the ratings are down on the tour and this, that. [But] I’ll tell you what, it’s harder to get a tee time than it’s ever been. There’s more young people who are playing. Golf club memberships are super expensive. The game is in a really healthy spot outside of the PGA Tour. I think it’s within the Tour’s control to sort of move in that direction and they’re doing it.”