• by Wayne Friedman , 5 hours ago

Major League Baseball has seen a decline in estimated linear TV advertising revenue to $342.3 million through the regular season and early-round playoffs, according to iSpot.tv.

With the World Series about to start up later this week, TV commercial airings have totaled 252,322, yielding 45.3 billion impressions.

A year ago during the same period, there were 433,906 airings and 63.8 billion impressions, with an estimated $500.6 million in ad revenue.

Declining ad revenue on linear TV is due to a number of issues: the financial weakening of regional cable TV baseball networks -- which have included bankruptcies -- as well as a shift to overall national digital/streaming platforms and a shortening of games (due to the installing of a pitch clock), which means less advertising time.

Streaming advertising has seen growth, with benefits on Netflix, Apple TV, Peacock and from ESPN (via its digital/streaming platform as well as also managing MLB.TV).

Under NBCUniversal’s new "Sunday Night Baseball" this season, ad money shifted around, with baseball fans also watching on NBC’s Peacock streaming platform.

This year so far, Fox Television Network has taken in $90.5 million in ad revenue, followed by NBC at $53.6 million, Fox Sports 1 with $45.0 million, ESPN at $29.3 million, and TBS with $23.6 million.

Major paying MLB advertisers include Liberty Mutual, Geico, T-Mobile, Ace Hardware -- spending an estimated $5.2 million to $9.8 million.

Looking at commercial airings, Fox Television Network aired 4,577 MLB messages from March to mid-October, per iSpot, compared to a year ago, when it had 4,188 messages.

More recently, Fox, and its Fox Sports 1 cable network have suffered somewhat due to National League playoffs that are short and not competitive so far. Most recently, the Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games (4-0).

NBC’s first regular season of “Sunday Night Baseball” averaged a Nielsen-measured 2.7 million viewers.

Fox’s “Baseball Night in America” on Saturday grew 15% to 2.35 million.

The ESPN/ABC MLB games package came in at 1.12 million -- lower than a year before -- for its airing of non-exclusive mid-week games.