NIL Sales grow 126% from Last Year, but Key Reporting Details on how it Grew are Missing

The NIL Store, the claimed “nation’s leader in officially licensed NIL apparel,” has reported that NIL Women’s Basketball sales grew 126% year over year, however, the organization fails to give key details on how it grew.

For those of you new to NIL, here’s a brief explanation of what NIL is:

What is NIL?

NIL stands for “Name, Image and Likeness.” Specifically, NIL, refers to the Name, Image and Likeness of college athletes and their ability to profit from various organizations using their name, image and likeness in a variety of settings. In one example, with NIL now established, a college football player can now earn money from their name, image and likeness being used in a video game that is being sold for profit. In another example, with NIL now established, for profit organizations, can now produce officially licensed apparel that includes both the school name and or logo as well as the name, image and likeness of a college athlete with the athlete receiving compensation for the NIL used on the apparel.

Returning to the headline of this article, The NIL Store reports NIL Women’s Basketball sales grew 126% from last year, however, they fail to give detail on how the sales grew, instead they simply say sales grew and conclude that sales growth points to the current popularity of women’s basketball at the collegiate level.

In order for the statement, sales growth equals popularity, one needs to give detail to what exaclty is meant by the term “sales.” In the case of the NIL Store report, we only know that sales occurred, we do not know if the NIL Store is referring to dollars received by the NIL Store, or units sold by the NIL Store.

Dollars recevied versus units sold is an important distinction to make if you want to discuss an item’s sales popularity. As we have all experienced over the past few years, the price of things can rise dramatically from one year to the next. So simply saying an item had sales growth does not necessarily mean to the item grew in popularity as you could sell the same amount of an item from one year to the next and still grow the dollars captured from the customer, this is because an item’s cost can increase from one year to the next. If you want to discuss an items true sales popularity, you have to measure units sold of the item from one year to the next.

The NIL Store could dramatically improve their reporting on NIL sales by letting their readers know if they are talking about dollars captured or units sold. In this case, if units sold of NIL women’s college basketball apparel grew by 126% year over year, then yes, the popularity of NIL college women’s basketball is on a big upswing.