CEO of Sports.ru - about how to become the largest media in the market of mobile applications in the CIS

The site Sports.ru was launched in the late 90s. In 2011, the project reached a payback and brought profit until 2015.

Two years ago, the company successfully entered the mobile application market and released several dozen applications at once. Mobile applications have already downloaded 5 million users, and the number of page views in them is more than 400 million. None of the Russian media did not show such results. Despite the growth of the audience, due to the crisis, advertising revenues, constituting 99% of the company's revenue, have decreased dramatically. Now the team Sports.ru opens an office in Barcelona and attracts foreign audiences.

The CEO of Sports.ru and the mobile sports publisher Tribuna Digital, former sports journalist Dmitry Navosh, told The Secret Firm about development strategy, competition with other media, monetization of mobile applications and much more.
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"Megamind" leads the most interesting statements from the interview .

Yes, perhaps, of all the media in Russia - not search engines, social networks and portals - we are now the biggest in mobile. There is no universal open gauge, but I communicate with many, I know the numbers of the main players. In sports, we are definitely the clear leader in mobile, and not only in Russia - but also in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In the West, everyone deals with this market, starting with the New York Times ( NYT ) and ending with more modern projects like the British Sky - their TV channels are very cleverly presented in applications. They, like us, solve individual problems of users.

About unbundling strategy

We just transferred our best practices to the mobile from the web and social networks. On Sports.ru about each club there is a mini-site with a memorable address of the form sports.ru/spartak , the same goes for every athlete - for example, sports.ru/sharapova . There are separate streams in social networks, bots in Telegram, people can subscribe and read only interesting, but not everything in a row. Now we already know that this is called unbundling, and this strategy is successfully used by many. At NYT, for example, last year a separate application, NYT Coking, appeared, and a little earlier, an app about crosswords.

But it's still not a story about quantity. It required some kind of response to one of the challenges of the time - the fragmentation of the interests of the audience. The answer turned out quite good: it works, the audience is growing rapidly.

First of all, we think about whether the user needs it. Secondly, how will we make money on the project? We see that it is necessary: ​​the audience of thematic applications and views are ahead of the Sports.ru application, despite the fact that almost all the content that is in the thematic applications can be found on Sports.ru. Simply, the user wants to download the application and see what he needs there.

About monetization of mobile applications

It is important that users do not go away: the audience is growing not only in the mobile, which is logical, but even on the web, which by all estimates should already stagnate. By the way, in Android we have developed premium accounts - you can use the version of the application without ads when you subscribe to 90 rubles per month, 550 per year, you can pay 950 rubles and disable it forever.

More often [buy] precisely the most expensive option - “forever”. For us, this is still a small source of revenue, it is unlikely that they will pay more than 1%. But after the appearance of this option, users began to advertise in general more loyal: they understand that now it is their choice. Now everyone is trying to work in a situation of squeezing demand - airlines keep ticket prices, we reduce advertising prices in order to show it more. We are talking about this to users, please disable Adblock on our site, because this is the salary of two employees. Many respond well to our requests.

Now we have over 200 applications of five types. Every new thing costs us nothing but an hour of work by the designer and assembler. These can be applications on a thematic vertical - “tennis” or all the same “Amkar”, on the tournament - the Olympics in Sochi.

On competition in Russia

We are somehow calm about the competition, I don’t think that we are really beaten up by traditional methods, the classical media model. And while no one knows how to use the new ones. We will not be beaten by “Sportbox” or “Championship” with our holdings; we will be beaten by young brave startups with even more breakthrough approaches, a fresh look at things. But such startups have not yet been seen, the feeling that everything is all around in despondency and depression.

We win at the expense of a very compact edition. Many popular texts are created by users. Before the interview, we discussed an investigation into the record sponsorship contract of VTB, in fact, a fraud, because of which the Russian club was thrown out of European cups. This is also a blogger material. A great guy, we even called him to work for us, but for a person journalism would be a step backwards in the sense of money - the salaries in the media are small. He is a financial analyst at a large company, blogging as a hobby - and regularly bombed with such hits. Our editor simply does not have time to dig a topic for a week, and then write it.

On the influence of Sports.ru on Russian sport

I am afraid to myself to hang other people's awards on my chest, but there are many such examples. For example, in Russian football there is a problem of match fixing. We write about it very aggressively, although we were threatened with courts a million times, filed and withdrawn a lawsuit, because it is always negative publicity. There are simply no other tools to deal with them, although, in fact, this is a deception of the audience - it gets a foul product. Football, the result of which is already known. Our texts led to the fact that the match was not played with the result that was planned.

We have become a powerful platform for discussions on how sports should be organized. Many have written that the state should not play a big role in professional sports. Now, many of us are following us saying that it is impossible to make sport a business without removing from it extra state money that demotivates players.

About income

[August 2015] The best month in terms of audience. In terms of revenue on the web, we will fall as well as the entire media market. 2015 will be the first in four years when we show a loss. We knew this from the beginning of the year, so it went according to all forecasts. This could have been avoided by cutting the team, but we did not want to do that. Instead, they started to launch new projects and earn money from them, including in international markets.

Mobile growth continues strong audience growth, it doubles every six to eight months. And the money is growing, although at a slower pace. Advertisers and agencies always lag a little behind the audience, with the Internet in the 2000s everything was the same.

Our main advertisers in mobile - those who “live” there, - Gettaxi, Rocketbank - but the rest will also come, I have no doubt. Where to go if the dynamic, modern audience that everyone needs is already there.

Sports media has such a characteristic seasonality: in even years, everything grows much better, because of the World and European football championships, as well as the Olympics. The audience is bigger, advertising revenue is growing even more than the audience. There it was exactly in this season.