SPORTS DIGITAL CONTENT AS A PRODUCT OF THE EMOTIONAL ECONOMY: CREATIVE CAPITALISATION STRATEGIES

Abstract

The article examines affective value as an economically significant resource of sports digital content within the platform media economy. It highlights the methodological limitations of traditional quantitative engagement metrics – such as views, likes, comments, and reach – which primarily capture superficial behavioural responses and fail to reflect the underlying mechanisms of emotional engagement, social identification, and long-term user loyalty. Affective value is conceptualised as the capacity of media content to generate intense, durable, and repeatable emotional states that foster stable affective bonds between users, sports brands, and fan communities. In this perspective, affectivity is understood not only as a psychological characteristic of media perception but also as a specific form of symbolic capital that can be converted into measurable economic outcomes for digital platforms. The study identifies and analyses four key creative mechanisms shaping the affective potential of sports content: the narrativization of sporting events, algorithmic personalization of content distribution, interactive and immersive formats of engagement, and models of audience co-creation. These mechanisms perform a dual function: they amplify emotional resonance and deepen audience identification with sports communities while simultaneously enabling behavioural mediation that transforms affective engagement into measurable indicators of media-economic performance. Available empirical evidence suggests that emotionally rich campaigns may increase conversion rates by 20-30%, while highly engaged fans can demonstrate substantially higher lifetime customer value (LTV), in some cases up to fifty times greater. In this context, the economic performance of sports digital platforms is associated with the transformation of affective engagement into measurable indicators of user retention (19-35%), lifetime customer value (LTV), and average revenue per user (ARPU), while also taking into account potential risks of emotional fatigue and audience polarisation. The article proposes an analytical interpretation of affective value as a structural component of the media-economic model of sports content that integrates creative, economic, and ethical dimensions.