Football Media

Yesterday we talked about the gap between what MyFC (My Football Club) initially promised and what the venture actually delivers in terms of value to the users. Today let’s talk about another company that arrived with a big bang but ultimately collapsed when the revenues did not materialise as expected (or rather, as their huge investments demanded).

FanBanta went bust some while back – the official word is that they’ve gone into administration, a euphemism for ‘we bet too much on the wrong horse’ and now one of the properties they owned (footballforums.net) has been bought out by Fast Web Media, the same company that owns 4thegame.com.

Recently over at Hive we talked about the need to operate in an emergency turnaround phase when running your business. To quote:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 1

Fancy owning a football club? It used to be that you needed millions to buy out a club, but then MyFootballClub broke the barriers between big football and the common man and brought club ownership to the Internet for only £35 per year.

The biggest draw – the biggest selling point – was the level of control offered to members. Few people are interested in buying a share in a football club they don’t support – with all due respect, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Ebbsfleet United FC – but MFC worked around that by offering the illusion of control akin to Football Manager. Owners (us!) were to have a say in tactics, team selection, transfers, kits and what not.

The best part of all this – the best-executed part, that is – was the promotion. Give the fan a chance to select the team for a real game? Real-life football manager – and if you haven’t played the game, grab a copy and waste away a weekend so you can understand the drool-inducing addiction we are talking about.

Many have previously argued (including myself over at Soccerlens and Ian over at 200 percent – links here) that MyFC was unrealistic in what it promised and impractical in that fans, once they got over the initial excitement, would stop caring.

Apparently, that is exactly what is happening at MyFC.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 7

Previously we talked about how to get your football news site listed in NewsNow. That’s only half the battle though – once you’re in, you also need to know how to maximise exposure and traffic from NewsNow.

Here are a few suggestions to help you maximise traffic to your football news site from NewsNow:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Promotion Comments: 0

NewsNow (Football) is, at the time of writing, the easiest source of traffic for football bloggers. Yes, Google (search, images and news) may get you more traffic and social media sites like StumbleUpon can also bring in plenty of traffic, but NewsNow makes it easy. Once you’re in, you just need a catchy headline and the right timing and hundreds (and thousands) of readers will come flooding through NewsNow.

And while you’d think it’s quite simple to get into NewsNow (a straight-forward submission process, hardly any editorial criteria), most people stumble at this step. Here are a few pointers to help you get your blog in, without any hassles:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Promotion Comments: 11

Disclosure: I’m a registered member of MFC and as such, I guess I’m a single-share-holding member of the Trust that in turn has a 51% share in Ebbsfleet United.

Ian from 200Percent has written in quite some detail about MyFootballClub (thank you for the links, RR) and after going through all of them, I thought this would be a good forum to share them. Ian raises several interesting points in his articles (written in Nov 07 and Jan 08) and if you’re interested in learning more about MFC / Ebbsfleet as well as the issues surrounding them, you must read these articles.

• Fleet Of Foot
• More Questions Than Answers
• My Football Club Re-visited
• Whose Football Club?
• Voting For Christmas

Ian runs the excellent 200Percent blog.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 3

As we’ve discussed earlier, the football blogging community is too dispersed and too divisive. Perhaps its because the key players are not experienced enough or because the niche itself hasn’t evolved from the traditional turf-grabbing mentality. In any case, I was a bit surprised to see last year that there was no recognition for quality blogs and bloggers in the football blogging niche.

Well, we’ve rectified that (and then some) with the Soccerlens 2007 Awards.

I deliberately launched this on a smaller scale to make it manageable the first around, but with the positive response this has received, I’m certain that the next time around will be much bigger (and hopefully, gain proper recognition). There are a lot of quality football bloggers around, and hopefully the awards can help shine the spotlight on some of them.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging Comments: 0

Update: Last week I posted a few questions that I had for MyFootballClub that were never answered. In stepped Simon from “The People’s Club” who was kind enough to answer our questions. The People’s Club is a similar venture to MyFootballClub, and to be honest the only reason I think they’ve paid us attention and MFC haven’t is because MFC are getting tons of publicity and can afford to pick and choose, while TPC are no where in the same league (no offense intended).

Anyway, the post below has been updated with Simon’s answers – have a read, it’s good stuff.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 3

Chris from Footy 24/7 and I were just talking on MSN right now, and the topic of revenue came up again – we’ve seen in the last year and a half that football news delivers no where near the sort of ad revenue (from AdSense, CPM, affiliate products or direct ads) the way the same traffic and user-base would in another niche.

The lack of money makes it hard for bloggers to turn their passion into a full-time gig, which is why you see so many failed football blogs (yes, there’s several of them around, good ones too). There are few ‘top’ football blogs, and even fewer independent blogs (Andrew’s Arseblog, Damien’s AVFC Blog, Chris with his EPLTalk and related websites, V at Kickette and, if I may say so, Soccerlens).

Others? CaughtOffside – owned by Sportingo. Pies – owned by Shiny Media. TheOffside – owned by BootsNAll. It’s a tough business to get big and successful in if you don’t have investment, and even then for most people the effort isn’t worth it unless you’re making enough money through other means and are willing to take the hit in revenues to work on something you love.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of selling Soccerlens – but in the long run if you can keep working hard (and smart – nothing worse than working hard in the wrong direction), there’s money to be made and if you can make money talking about something you love (even if it’s not as much money as in web tech or gadgets or real estate), it’s worth something.

In my opinion there are 3 goals a football blog should have:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging Comments: 6

FootballMedia.com aims to be a collection – a network – of the best football websites online.

In the future I’ll discuss more of what Football Media is about and also take this opportunity to showcase the sites part of the footballmedia.com network.

Till then, take a look at our flagship football news site, Soccerlens.com.

If you’re interested in joining us, please read this page.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Site News Comments: 0