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If you read last week’s newsletter about Volkswagen, you’ll know that I promised more car-related stories to come. Well, surprise: I meant right now. Buckle up!
On the heels of a major motion picture, I figured that this week is the time to talk about Formula 1 (or, as those in the know say, ‘F1’). After all, it turns out that for an increasing number of Americans, F1 goes well beyond Brad Pitt. As recently covered by USA Today, F1 and Motorsport Network’s 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey discovered that the U.S. market "stands out for accelerating fan growth, especially among younger, digital-first audiences." The survey also indicates increased enthusiasm among female and Gen Z consumers.
Now this might just be a me thing, but when I see a statistic about how a sports league is increasing viewership rates among new demographics—particularly those two cohorts—my mind goes to creators. I’ve written before in this very newsletter about how professional sports leagues are leveraging creators to expand their fanbases, but those stories just applied to good old fashioned American sports leagues. What about a league that’s also trying to jump over here from the other side of the world?
When I began investigating F1, I was curious to see three things (beyond learning, uh, what F1 actually is):
Let’s start with that first question—not only because it’s the first one, which seems like a fine enough place to start, but also because it’s the easiest one to answer.
Here is the answer: yes.
Below, let’s take a look at F1’s global post count over the last several years. That’s the number of posts from creators on CreatorIQ’s global database that tag or mention F1 in some capacity:
As you can see from the graph, the numbers did in fact get bigger. From 2020 to 2024, that post count saw a 10x increase, surging from 13.3k mentions to 155.1k.
Keep that scale in mind as we consider what F1’s progress over the same time period looked like in Europe, a market where F1 was already pretty well-saturated:
Over in Europe, we’re going from 8.7k posts in 2020—65% of F1’s global post count—to 69.3k posts in 2020, good for a cool 45% of F1’s total mentions. The implication? Though F1 continues to make strides in Europe, an increasing share of the league’s mentions comes from other geographies.
Speaking of those other geographies, here’s the post count chart for the U.S.:
F1 Post Count (US): 2020 - 2024
Again: keep in mind the scale here. We’ve now gone from 3k posts in 2020 to 49.2k posts in 2024, a 16x increase. In five short years, mentions from U.S.-based creators have risen from a 23% share of F1’s total post count to a 32% share.
That can’t all be Brad Pitt’s doing. Especially since the movie didn’t come out until 2025.
So let’s consider more of question two: how does this growth differ across various markets? We saw a bit of that while looking at post count, and similar patterns emerge when we look at F1’s engagements: there’s growth everywhere, but on different scales, and it’s not as uninterrupted as growth for the league’s total mentions.
Globally, we’re looking at a 19x increase between 2020 (112.3M) and 2024 (2.2B). That said, things waver a bit between 2021 and 2022, showing that this improvement hasn’t been linear.
A similar story in Europe, though again at a smaller scale: a 29x surge from 98.2M engagements in 2020 (an 87% share of F1’s global engagements) to 1.7B in 2024 (a 77% share).
And in the U.S.? A surprising result:
An almost negligible total in 2020, and a decrease from 2021 to 2022! Yep, that’s an incredible 49x shift from 20.3M engagements in 2020 (an 18% share of F1’s global total) to just shy of a billion five years later, with 985.6M in 2024 (a 45% share of F1’s total). So when you wonder where F1’s surge in engagements is coming from, wonder no longer: it’s the U.S. market.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering about this, too: creators can belong to multiple geographic panels, depending on their posting activity or the location of their fanbase. So that’s why the Europe + U.S. numbers outpace the global numbers—some creators are included in both counts.)
This is the part of the newsletter where I look into channel dynamics. Usually, it’s also the part where I talk about why TikTok is largely responsible for a brand’s growth. We’ll be skipping that latter portion of the newsletter this week: turns out, F1 has a different channel to thank.
Almost two-thirds of F1’s global impressions come from Instagram, while just one-third comes from TikTok. Predictably, the rate of impressions stemming from TikTok was even lower in Europe:
At least YouTube is exactly the same!
And what of the U.S.? As longtime readers know, TikTok doesn’t usually drive the level of engagement that we saw in the U.S. market, as opposed to impressions at large.
In a big surprise for me, F1 saw a greater global share of impressions from TikTok (34.4%) than it did in the U.S. (31.9%). In this case, other markets are clearly tipping the needle—uh, speedometer—toward TikTok. But across the big three markets, and the world at large, Instagram reigned supreme for F1.
That ties directly into F1’s creator strategy, which in turn ties into question No. 3 from all the way back at the beginning of this newsletter: how is the league utilizing creators? I saw several trends, all of which amplify trends seen from other sports leagues facing a similar opportunity:
So there you have it, folks: tremendous growth, acceleration in America, and a laser-focus on creators to rival any sports league anywhere. With impressive progress and a thriving social ecosystem, there’s no telling how far F1 might zoom ahead, but creators are sure to have their hands on the wheel.
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