X is doubling down on sports, with Wednesday’s news that it’s expanding its “Gametime” feature on the social media site to go beyond tracking the NFL alone.
First announced in August, NFL Gametime is X’s new project that offers a single hub for tracking live scores, getting play-by-play updates, tuning into game feeds, and more. The move wasn’t meant to be useful only to X users who like to congregate on the platform to discuss live sporting events, but to woo brands and advertisers looking to reach passionate sports fans.
At Advertising Week New York, X said Gametime will become a year-round destination spanning “all professional sports.”
However, that full expansion isn’t yet live as of today. Instead, X announced its second league partnership with Major League Baseball (MLB). Arriving this month, the new MLB experience will allow baseball fans to follow and engage in postseason discussions and will organize things like scores and stats, team and league content, plus news, creator content, and real-time discussions.
X said content from other leagues will be added soon, including the NBA.
The expansion of the Gametime feature comes as X continues its efforts to win back advertisers — in this case by leveraging live sports and their highly engaged fans as a way to draw brands back to X.
“In just six weeks, Gametime has evolved from a football-focused product into a scalable destination for sports, attracting strong demand across major advertisers from payments to consumer goods looking to engage highly attentive fans from the pregame conversation through the biggest moments of the game,” said SpaceXAI’s head of Global Advertising, Monique Pintarelli, in an announcement.
The new feature’s introduction follows X owner Elon Musk’s July settlement in a multiyear legal battlewith the advertising trade group the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which X had sued for its alleged “illegal boycott” of the platform.
Some advertisers had become uncomfortable with the platform’s lax moderation standards under Musk, as well as with Musk’s outsized position on the social media site, where he often spouted controversial views and politicsds and ad agencies away from X, suggesting it was a place where their ads could appear next to harmful online content
X’s announcement of the settlement in July said the move “resets the relationship between the two organizations.” The company also committed to both freedom of speech and brand-safety innovations.
