The number of sports and events still to get online is tiny, with all but the smallest properties having some kind of presence on the web. That being said there is a world of difference between the best of sport online and the rest.
Now for the first time, SportBusiness has reviewed hundreds of sports websites to select the top 100 online destinations. The result is Ultimate Sports Websites, your guide to creating a winning online proposition for sport.
A good website can do many things. It can drive interest in a sport, provide a community for fans, deliver profile for sponsors and act as a significant revenue stream in its own right. The Ultimate Sports Websites report will show you how the best in the business do it and how you can incorporate latest thinking on your website.
New Online Revenue Streams
Many early models for web business involved giving everything away for free and making money off the visitor traffic. This thinking has been seriously questioned recently as many have shown more reliable models for online profits. We review the main business models, examine their key characteristics and show just how they can work on your website. Online content has been shown to have value and there are now good and profitable examples of subscription websites.
We show what kind of content is required to drive subscriptions and how new and archive material can combine with data and user generated content to present a winning proposition. Advertiser funded models are perhaps better known but are often poorly understood. We examine how online advertising can improve the proposition for sponsors, show how even apparently premium content can be funded profitably and present new hybrid models which combine advertising and subscriptions. Beyond these two main business models there are several other proven ways of generating profits or reducing costs which are all explored in the report including:
- Pay-per-view video and mobile video content
- Transaction services – ticketing, hospitality management
- Merchandise and third party product sales
- Affiliate marketing
- Content syndication
- Betting and gambling
- Fantasy gaming
- Web-based mobile services
Implementing just one of these services could seriously improve your online profits.
Getting on board with Social Networking
The biggest recent phenomenon online has been the explosion of social networking with sites like Facebook and Craigslist posting huge increases in traffic and genuinely changing the way people interact with each other.
Sports websites have proved to be very adept at providing destinations where fans can meet and exchange views. Indeed, the community network is one of the most compelling aspects of the successful sports site.
The Ultimate Sports Website report demonstrates the power of athletes to engage armies of fans via blogs and twitter. Discover how this can be harnessed to generate traffic and feed into the marketing campaigns of sponsors and advertisers.
User generated content (UGC) is an effective and low budget way of improving the website proposition both by increasing the amount of information, pushing sites up the Google rankings and increasing page impressions. But that is not all. We show how sports websites are using UGC to give advertisers unique insights into how their brands are viewed enabling them to make better branding decisions.
The Top 100 Sports Websites
The Ultimate Sports Websites report would not be complete without a comprehensive ranking of the best sports sites in the world. Split into separate categories for Clubs/Teams, Federations/
Leagues, Event sites and Sports Portals, the ranking provides case studies into the most successful global operators.
The winners are not restricted to those with the deepest pockets with numerous examples of smaller sites that really understand their online community. Digging beneath the headlines will enable you to review examples of the best use of content, video and data, the best use of community and social networking, new ways of monetising commercial partnerships and much more.
