Soccer market analysis: #5 Laggards
Ten, even seven years ago you could have flipped the position of these two groups in this sector, as original publishing houses struggled with overheads and misguided strategy, whilst aggregators and portals sliced traffic from their immense reach into their respective Sports verticals. Today both are struggling for growth against the headwinds of more innovative and unique propositions, but now original publishing houses and magazines have stolen the reach once enjoyed by the former.
General Sports News (magazines): Where, in the not so distant past, these sites were struggling to migrate their businesses online, today they are amongst the most popular destinations for fans in the market. Magazines or newspapers like Marca in Spain, L'Equipe in France and FourFourTwo in the UK, have historically suffered badly from a drop in subscriber numbers for their physical print magazines. They scanned and copied the printed word to primitive websites, coded in pop up ads and site takeover experiences, and expected the users and advertisers to come. It was a model that once worked in a world before the Internet, and now everyone is online we’re just bringing our content to the masses, right? Wrong. In the middle of last decade no fan wanted to read full length articles online, wait for heavy, worse, multiple pages to load with glossy images and too much text. And no-one, not even your most avid brand champions, wanted to pay a subscription for online content thy can get free everywhere else. After a decade of struggles for the magazine industry, including many of our favourite 80’s and 90’s titles shuttering, at the turn of this decade the tide started to change… Facebook & Google, the lifeblood of all of these categories of Soccer sites & services, had long been awarding rank and traffic to original over syndicated content. However, it wasn’t until around 2010 that the industry reached a tipping point where both of the above had perfected their algorithms and crawlers, and the original publishing houses had learnt how to master SEO and SRO (Social Referral Optimisation as it was known then). Original content became king, and syndication and aggregation alone was no longer a viable strategy for Sports sites in the market. The publishing houses pivoted their online content strategies and the audiences started organically coming. Subscriptions even became successful as these players learnt where to draw the line between freemium and premium. The second turning point for these publishing houses was around 2013 when content strategies for social really reached maturity. Social networks and community sites required a new breed of content, and as fans migrated their timespent from traditional destinations to social networks, the publishing houses had to follow the traffic. Again, these sites ended up winners because they had the editorial and journalistic manpower to afford separate teams looking after content for social. Today they dominate the Soccer market in terms of audience, but are stagnating in growth & engagement as many fail to board the trend trains like Fantasy, Fan blogs/communities and personalisation. They also individually struggle as they are single language offerings, meaning the opportunity is only as big as the soccer fan base in your one market. Not only do these players have a growth ceiling in terms of unique users, they also suffer chronically from engagement shortfalls, having settled on strategies to soak up users from Facebook and Google, whose firehoses are notorious for sending ‘one page’ visitors that bounce immediately. Today, in 2015, the strongest are evolving, but it’s an illustration of how fast and frequent this industry changes, that this category has had to reinvent itself three times since migrating it’s print content online.
Sports Aggregators & Portals: The once kings and kingsmakers of this market, now play catch up to more innovative product and content strategies. AOL, MSN, Terra, Tiscali, Virgillio, T-Online- portals and email providers of a bygone era, still draw enough traffic to underpin competitive sports sites, but all understand it is not enough to attract serendipitous visitors or organic traffic. There are exceptions, like Yahoo, who continue to invest in journalists, original content and product innovation in the Fantasy space, hence remaining the #1 trafficked Sports destination globally, but younger soccer fans no longer will list Yahoo Sports within their top 3 daily fixes. MSN have swayed from aggregation, heavy investment in sports editorial, and most recently back to full automation, but across virtually all markets they’ve dropped out of the top ten ranks for traffic in the sports markets, and for Soccer specifically, don’t even make the radar. Many of these ex-portals are paralysed by internal politics and boardroom impatience, that a Sports strategy typically won’t last more than 12 months. That makes it very hard for users to place an identity on these sites, and so they’ve become a secondary, tertiary level reference sites for fans.
