The 2026 World Surf League (WSL) campaign marks the 50th anniversary of the sport’s Championship Tour.

Professional surfing entered the landmark season with momentum.

“Audience reach was up 40% [FY 2025 vs FY 2024],” Ryan Crosby (CEO, World Surf League) said.

But unlike many of the ratings gains being reported across sports, its growth is not a result of changes in Nielsen’s viewership measurement methodology. WSL events air on YouTube and across freely distributed owned and operated channels.

Instead, the increase in attention is being fueled by the sport’s revamped approach to digital marketing and consumer targeting.

“A lot of what I learned in streaming video is what I'm applying here,” Crosby said.

When the CEO arrived in 2024, the WSL’s audience segmentation data was largely psychographic. The concept of ‘loving surfing’ was tied to how much time one spent in the water trying to catch waves.

Now, content consumption serves as the primary identifier of surfing fandom.

“We started looking at our events less like a sport and more like Netflix looks at their programming, or how Hulu and Disney Plus would look at theirs,” Crosby said.

World Surf League was founded in 1983, seven years after the Championship Tour circuit was established.

However, pro surfing “was only consolidated once [Ziff Capital Partners or ZCP], the current ownership group, bought the Association of Surfing Professionals 14 years ago,” Crosby said. “Prior to that, it was mostly a collective of individually licensed events that were largely owned and operated by endemics like Rip Curl, Billabong, and Quiksilver.”

ZCP operates WSL as a singular sanctioning body and controls the entirety of the pro surfing ecosystem (think: championship, challenger, qualifying, and junior series). Today, the Championship Tour has 12 stops, including locations in New Zealand, El Salvador, Brazil, Tahiti, Fiji, and California.

The season “starts in April in Australia and ends in December at Pipeline in Hawaii, which is like the holy grail of surfing,” Crosby said.

While the Championship Tour showcases shortboarding excellence (think: aerials, hard turns), WSL holds competitions for longboard and big wave surfers too. 1,800 athletes around the globe pay fees to the entity annually to participate and compete for prizes in branded events.

Historically, WSL’s business has been sponsorship driven. That dynamic persists. But its partner mix has shifted dramatically in recent years.

Back in ’22, roughly one third of Championship Tour sponsors were endemic to surfing. That percentage has since dipped into the single digits.

“We now have 15 sponsors with a $5 billion plus market cap,” Crosby said.

A list includes Lexus (Toyota Motor Corp), Apple, Yeti, and Corona (AB InBev).

Blue-chip brands are flocking to WSL in pursuit of a younger fan base than most other sports can offer.

“Our average viewer is 38,” Crosby said.

It’s also a differentiated audience from those tuning in to big four sporting events. 77% of WSL fans do not follow another major sports property on Instagram.

And Championship Tour viewers are a largely affluent bunch as they tend to be located on the coasts.

Site fees help fuel WSL’s business too.

“We drive a lot of tourism, so governments are willing to pay a lot of money for us to come,” Crosby said. “We have the ability to put a new surf break on the map.”

Just look at Peniche and Nazaré. The WSL’s Portuguese leg reportedly generated more than $25mm in surf tourism revenue in ‘24.

The action sports property generates some ticketing-related income. But local regulations (think: inability to ticket a public beach) and natural limitations (i.e. in some locations waves break in the middle of the ocean, not on a beach) make regularly posting large gates difficult.

“The audience is primarily reached through broadcast,” Crosby said.

80mm viewers around the globe tuned into WSL events last season. They collectively consumed 20mm hours of surf-related programming (+20% YoY).

Improvements in digital marketing and targeting are credited with driving the growth.

“A lot of our data-driven decision-making has gotten better,” Crosby said.

That’s not surprising given he brought the playbook over from esports and streaming. Crosby spent the bulk of his career building global brands (see: Xbox, Netflix, Hulu, Riot Games) and shaping fan experiences outside of sport (think: Halo, Call of Duty, Stranger Things, Valorant, League of Legends).

The businesses are “almost entirely parallel,” he said. WSL’s “owned-and-operated and YouTube platform, where all its content is consumed, is entirely digitally focused.”

So, like a streamer, Crosby recentered the sports property’s ‘strategic foundation’ around engagement.

The more immersed a viewer is in WSL content, the less likely they are to churn out of it or leave the platform. And the more likely they are to become increasingly devoted fans over time.

“Consumption behavior is reflective of a healthier viewer,” Crosby said. The goal is “move fans further down the funnel and get them to consume more.”

WSL also began tracking new registrations and ‘24-hour watchers’, no different than a DTC service would.

“What is the content fans watch within the first 24 hours of coming to the platform,” Crosby asked. Because “that is likely the thing that drove them to sign up for the service.”

But running one’s own broadcast efforts is a costly endeavor. Prize money and travel expenses are large line items too.

So, continued commercial growth remains essential.

WSL believes substantial upside exists within its partnerships business.

“Obviously, sponsorship revenue is a trailer to audience growth. So, we'll continue to see that move in the right direction with existing sponsors,” Crosby said.

The CEO is also convinced he still has 10 ‘seven-figure categories’ to sell into. That doesn’t include the Championship Tour’s naming rights, which are currently being marketed.

“We expect to sell them for 2027 and that's a seven-to-eight-million-dollar annual entitlement based on Wasserman’s assessment,” Crosby said.

From there, WSL will look to various forms of direct monetization for growth (think: pay-per-view, wave forecasting, coaching).

“Probably the most interesting opportunity right now derives from the proliferation of surfing wave pools in the world. There are ~35 today. There will be 70 by 2027,” Crosby said.

That gives the rights owner an opportunity to launch new branded club programs capable of both developing talent and driving incremental revenue.

“There is also a world where we begin to creep into the travel and tourism piece of the business,” Crosby said.

But all of those endeavors will depend on what the model tells them.

“Similar to the way Netflix does, we have the ability to understand the movement and size of the audience, and how likely they would be to pay for a product and what they would be willing to pay,” Crosby said. Combined “with brand tracking data, our intelligence provides a much more complete picture of the audience in terms of targeting and going directly to them for our brand partners.”

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