NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the 2018 Award Show at Santa Monica, California on Monday was an unprecedented experience for the league and an opportunity to set up a new tradition.

This is the second such ceremony NBA has launched, but it was nothing new for the other three of the four major sports leagues in North America. NHL started the event in 2009 before NFL in 2012 and MLB in 2015, all earlier than NBA.

Compared with its peers, NFL had the most successful award ceremony, NFL Honors that was launched the night before the Super Bowl in the host city. Over four million people on average have watched the event in the past seven years.

Both NBA and NFL shared the form of combining sports and entertainment for the ceremony. On Monday, Anthony Anderson opened up the event and was joined by multiple entertainment stars for performances. Victor Oladipo, winner of the 2018 NBA Most Improved Player Award even sang a song without music.

Such performances got the attention of entertainment media outlets.

What’s behind the show was the competition between NBA and NFL for audience ratings. The broadcasting rights contribute a large share to the revenue of sports leagues and are decided by audience ratings. Though NBA is more popular overseas, the NFL dominates the US TV market. According to Top 50 US TV Broadcasts 2017 of Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, the top three events were all football games. By contrast, the best performing event NBA had was Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals which only ranked 23rd on the list.

The huge advantage in audience ratings brought extraordinary benefits to NFL. NBA receives about 2.6 billion US dollars from its new broadcasting contract, an increase of 180 percent from the past. However, NFL made that number overshadowed with as much as seven billion dollars from broadcasting rights every year.

Though falling behind in traditional media market, NBA was leading in rising social media as the only professional sports league to have over one billion followers on social media platforms (including followers of all teams and players of the league). On Twitter, NBA outnumber NFL with over three million followers.

The difference in audiences explained NBA’s advantage. NFL fans were mainly made up of conservative groups, nearly 70 percent of which were over 35 years old, who do not show much interest in Twitter and preferred television for sports. By contrast, around 45 percent of NBA fans were under 35. It was also the only one of the four major sport leagues in North America that had more African American fans.

With the advantage of social media platforms, NBA has made the award ceremony a new growth engine. Digital and social media were two of the league’s focuses with the sponsors. While displaying sponsor logos on TV, NBA has also added advertisement of sponsors to videos, photos, and highlights of the ceremony on all relevant websites and social media platforms (including the Twitter accounts of NBA, NBA on TNT, NBA TV and NBA Facebook account).

NBA receives its revenues in three ways: Sales of game tickets and relevant products, enterprise sponsorship and TV money. For the past 2017-18 season, the league had about 1.12 billion dollars from sponsors, an increase of 31 percent from last season. In the four years since commissioner Adam Silver took over, the league saw sponsor money growing by 65 percent. By contrast, NFL received around 1.25 billion dollars in the past season. Though NBA is still falling behind, it is catching up quickly.

The award ceremony was also a repayment to broadcasters. In 2014, the league signed a new nine-year deal with ESPN, ABC, and TNT that’s worth about 24 billion dollars. TNT paid 1.2 billion of the 2.6 billion dollars that went to NBA every year. For that, the league put the award ceremony on TNT as a benefit.

The 1.12 billion from sponsors plus the 1.2 billion from a broadcaster was some 2.3 billion dollars, a huge amount of money that NBA tried to repay in different ways and the award ceremony was one of them. The event provided a better advertisement for sponsors while creating opportunities for broadcasters. A new way of cooperation that maximizes its own advantage, that’s what today’s NBA is exploring to compete with NFL.