Publishing Models In Football News
Having looked at different publisher models in football blogging over the last 4 years, I see two big trends for the near future (a lot of this has happened and is happening right):
1. Democratisation of access
People will access content in a myriad of ways. Mobile, RSS, Website, YouTube, Audio are just the surface. You’ll see a lot of syndication, aggregation, widget-based content use, mashups, data-driven content, casual games, interactive apps, etc etc.
Search engines. Other bloggers. Twitter. Facebook. Retail stores. Product lines. Competitions.
There are 101 different ways to access your brand, and knowing how to tap all of them will determine how many people you can reach (and if you’re looking at the bottom line, how much money you can make).
2. Aggregation of content
It’s not so much that the big keep getting bigger but that the small sites are more likely to stay stuck at the same level than the big sites, and the good writers keep migrating to bigger platforms (more exposure, more money) therefore reinforcing the strength that big brands have.
In football we’ve seen this happen with Goal.com hiring many good bloggers, OleOle tapping up several good blogs and The Offside building their model around attracting bloggers to setup their own blogs on their site.
This will keep happening in the next few years. The trick is to know how to benefit from this.
The approach is different from generic sites (non-team football news) and specific sites (team-specific or very topical sites like Footy Boots and Kickette).
For a site like Soccerlens, it pays to go the Goal.com way – create new sections, bring in dedicated writers for each section and then promoting, promoting, promoting. The breakthrough for sites like SL & EPL Talk will come when they get a financial breakthrough (to accelerate growth) or just do an outstanding job in growing organically by differentiating themselves on a particular product (i.e. what EPL Talk is doing with their podcast).
I wouldn’t dream of starting a brand new football news site now though – it’s way easier to buy one and build from there.
For team sites / niche sites, it’s a different story. I’ve got an idea (it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary) and hopefully you’ll see it in action in the coming months on the Football Media network. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll share it here.
But regardless of whether you’re a team-specific site or a generic football news site, you need to take care of two things right now:
- Giving your target audience more ways to access your content
- Figure out to access a much larger platform of readers than right now – either through partnerships, through rapid growth or through mergers. You might not like it, but you need to build fast or partner with someone who is growing fast. Everyone else will get left standing still.
