Fan lifetime value

What a fan is worth over a decade decides what acquiring, converting, and keeping them is allowed to cost. This model discounts margin against segment retention curves for five fan segments — including the playoff cohort just acquired, whose year-two cliff is drawn on the curve rather than mentioned in a footnote.

Assumptions

Discount rate

8%

Cost of capital for discounting future margin.

Annual margin growth

2%

Price escalation plus per-cap growth per surviving account.

Retention shift, all segments

+0 pts

Blunt sensitivity: what the whole base is worth if retention moves.

Year-two save program

+0 pts

Retention recovered on the playoff cohort’s year-two dip — the lever the renewal model exists to pull.

Segments

Season-ticket members2,400

The book from the renewal model — high margin, high retention · $2,800/yr margin

Mini-plan holders3,100

Partial plans; the natural upgrade path to full season · $900/yr margin

Playoff-cohort new buyers9,500

Acquired during the run — strong year one, cliff in year two · $340/yr margin

Single-game buyers28,000

Repeat casual attendance, no plan commitment · $210/yr margin

Digital-only fans60,000

App, email, and merch only — the broadcast audience on file · $25/yr margin

Total fan equity · 10-year horizon

$48.8M

discounted lifetime value across 103,000 accounts in five segments

Lifetime value per account, by segment

Season-ticket members

$13,098

Mini-plan holders

$2,397

Playoff-cohort new buyers

$535

Single-game buyers

$152

Digital-only fans

$10

Survival by segment — the year-two cliff, drawn

Share of each cohort still active by year. The red curve is the playoff cohort: strong first renewal, then the dip. The save-program lever lifts exactly that segment of the curve.

0%25%50%75%100%yr 2yr 4yr 6yr 8yr 10Season-ticket membersMini-plan holdersPlayoff-cohort new bu…Single-game buyersDigital-only fans

Reading the model

  1. 01

    A season-ticket account is worth $13,098 over ten years — 86x a single-game buyer. Retention spending on the book is cheap against that number: one point of season-ticket retention is worth $1,504,971 in lifetime value across the base.

  2. 02

    Converting a single-game buyer to a mini-plan adds $2,245 of lifetime value per account. That is the prize on the table with the playoff cohort — and the ceiling on what conversion campaigns are allowed to cost.

  3. 03

    The year-two cliff is priced, not hypothetical: if the 9,500 playoff-cohort accounts renewed in year two at their year-one rate instead of dipping, the cohort would be worth $991,338 more. That number is the budget case for building the retention program now.

Method

Lifetime value per account is Σ margin × (1+g)ᵗ⁻¹ × S(t) ÷ (1+d)ᵗ over ten years, where S(t) is cumulative survival from segment retention curves. Retention seasons upward with tenure for most segments — fans who stay get stickier — while the playoff cohort carries an explicit year-two dip calibrated to how bandwagon cohorts behave after a breakthrough season.

The model’s outputs are budget ceilings, not trivia: segment LTV bounds acquisition cost, the single-to-plan conversion delta bounds campaign spend, and the priced year-two cliff is the business case for the renewal-risk program. This model consumes the identity-resolution output — per-fan margin is only computable once one fan stops being five records.

Segment sizes and margins are illustrative, scaled to a mid-market NHL club and consistent with the renewal model’s 2,400-account book. In production, margins come from unified transaction history, retention curves are fit per cohort from historical seasons, and LTV is validated against realized multi-year revenue.