IMSA’s ongoing embrace of YouTube to reach international audiences and the steady filling of its social media channels with original digital content was rewarded at the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.
With IMSA’s domestic audience supported through NBC and Peacock, it targeted YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook as frontiers to expand starting in 2024, and with the numbers in from Sebring, the series experienced an 18.8% year-to-year increase on YouTube.
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The rise from 505,000 live viewers last year to 600,173 last weekend saw a peak of 27,094 concurrent viewers and brought more than 20,000 new subscribers to IMSA’s YouTube channel during the event won overall by Porsche Penske Motorsport’s No. 7 963 Hybrid GTP.
“As we saw again on Saturday, our races continue to perform at a very high level with audiences around the globe,” IMSA President John Doonan told RACER. “One year after we saw great success with the debut of live YouTube streaming for international audiences, we saw a nearly 20 percent increase year-over-year. Our YouTube channel continues to add subscribers at an impressive rate, and eight figures worth of social media video views speaks to the incredible appetite of endurance sports car racing fans around the world.”
Separate from its international offering of the WeatherTech Championship through YouTube, IMSA also makes most of its development series available live domestically and throughout the world, including the Michelin Pilot Challenge series races and most of its single-make categories including Ford and its Mustang Challenge, Lamborghini and its Super Trofeo series, Mazda and its MX-5 Cup, and Porsche with its Carrera Cup North America.
IMSA’ entered 2025 with a YouTube subscriber base of 602,000 on January 1, and through the time of writing on March 17, it had risen to 821,421, an increase of 36.4 percent during the first three and a half months of the year.