The pitch clock, it turns out, was not the only thing that got faster this season.

Major League Baseball's estimated linear television advertising revenue has dropped to $342.3 million through the regular season and early-round playoffs, according to iSpot.tv, a decline of nearly a third from the $500.6 million recorded during the same period last year. Commercial airings fell even more sharply, to 252,322 from 433,906, yielding 45.3 billion impressions compared with 63.8 billion a year ago.

The reasons for the contraction are by now familiar to anyone who has been following the complicated economics of regional sports networks, which is to say, anyone who has watched several of them go bankrupt in recent years. The financial weakening of those local cable outlets, combined with the continued migration of viewers to streaming platforms, has reshaped where baseball advertising dollars actually land.

(The pitch clock, which was supposed to make games more exciting, has had the unintended consequence of making them shorter, which means fewer commercial breaks, which means less inventory to sell. Whether this counts as progress depends on whom you ask.)

The streaming services have been the beneficiaries. Netflix, Apple TV, Peacock and ESPN's digital platforms have all absorbed advertising that once would have run on linear television. NBCUniversal's new "Sunday Night Baseball" package, which debuted this season, directed viewers — and their accompanying ad revenue — toward Peacock as well as the broadcast network.

Among linear outlets, the Fox Television Network led with $90.5 million in advertising revenue, followed by NBC at $53.6 million, Fox Sports 1 at $45 million, ESPN at $29.3 million and TBS at $23.6 million. The top-spending advertisers included Liberty Mutual, Geico, T-Mobile and Ace Hardware, each investing between $5.2 million and $9.8 million.

Fox's postseason fortunes were not helped by the brevity of the National League playoffs, in which the Los Angeles Dodgers dispatched the Milwaukee Brewers in a four-game sweep — efficient for the Dodgers, less so for the sales department.

Original story published in MediaPost: "MLB Ad Airings Drop, Revenue Sinks To $342.3M"