“Championat.ru is designed for those who love sport”
Lecture of the project manager of Championat.ru Dmitry Sergeev for students of the specialization “Management in the field of Internet technologies” .
Development and development of a successful Internet project is work, knowledge, ability to communicate with people and a little luck. However, before you start your project, you should look at the experience of those who have already passed this path. This will avoid many mistakes and develop more efficiently and successfully. Dmitry Sergeev, Champion.ru project manager, spoke about the experience of developing and promoting his project.
“The audience of Russian users is divided into those who love sports and those who do not know about its existence,” Dmitry Sergeyev described the mindset of the Runet audience. - “Championship.ru is designed for those who love sports. I dedicated more than four years to this project. ”
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“There is a large segment - sports Runet. Tops the list of sports Internet resources "Sport-Express". We go in second place. Competitors follow us with a significant lag. Currently our audience is about two million unique users per month.
How and with what did we start? The project was conceived by me personally. At the same time, I worked offline (although initially I left the Internet - I was engaged in online advertising). Initially, I did a project without a clear business plan, more precisely, having it only in my head. First of all, I wanted to make a project for people, and that is why people went to this project.
Three times I tried to run Champion.ru. For the third time I came to Pavel Golovin, who as a result became my partner and co-investor. At that time he already had a project dedicated to European football - Fnews.ru. I offered him to make a project about Russian football on the basis of the engine of his site. We agreed with several outsourcers and started. The mechanism of operation was then simple - we were looking for sports news on various resources and published them on our website with reference to the source. Then it was allowed by law. We opened on March 11, 2005, and at first we were not particularly paid attention to. As I said, at first we had two projects - Fnews.ru and Champion.ru. Then we combined them. We approached the World Cup in 2006 by thoroughly preparing ourselves. This allowed us to break a big score - we have formed a large audience. After that, we did not dwell on the reprint of other people's news and began to actively increase the staff of our own authors. Our experts also began to translate news from foreign news sources. Our unique difference from other similar projects at that time was the availability of a database of sports statistics.
In the autumn of 2006, the Russian football championship ended, and we had to decide where to go next. It was that autumn that Gazeta.ru was suing us (they retroactively changed the agreement on the use of materials from their website and we were found guilty of copyright infringement). From that moment on, other sports sources began to choke us. In order to somehow secure ourselves, we became the official media with the right to quote. But even this only partially helped, and we realized that hard times were coming. It was at that moment that I was approached from a large company SUP Fabrik and offered to develop their sports project. I agreed only on the condition that I would go to them with my project. As a result, SUP bought Championat.ru. Of course, initially in SUP there was an opinion that Champion.ru was just a by-product, unlike LiveJournal. Therefore, we decided to slightly separate from them in terms of formulating our own policies, while remaining their project. Over time, the SUP began to realize that Championat.ru is a successful project. Thus, at present, SUP has three major projects - LiveJournal, Gazeta.ru and Championat.ru.
Then we began to open blogs using LiveJournal service. Blogs athletes, sports figures. I myself would not have thought of this - this is the idea of the SUP leadership. This was done in order to increase the intersection of the audience of projects SUP. However, directly for Championat.ru it is not entirely profitable - after all, in fact, we are losing a part of the audience that goes to blogs. And we cannot provide advertisers with advantageous statistics showing us.
In our plans for the near future to change the design and structure of the site. We also plan to launch sports Internet TV - Championship.TV and an online game based on real sports statistics. In addition to football, we began to develop in the direction of the multisports portal. Many advertisers were afraid of being sharpened specifically for football fans. They thought that these fans were interested only in specific products, such as beer. Now advertisers are calm - they see that we have sections dedicated to other sports and, thus, we are more attractive for advertising. But still, the proportion of football fans on our site is about 80 percent of the entire audience. ”
During the lecture, Dmitry Sergeev answered a number of questions from the audience.
- How many people do you have?
- The office currently employs about 35 people. Outside the office - about 60. Although people outside the office may receive a slight compensation.
- How can you explain the popularity of the resource?
- I'm just a big fan of football and other sports. When I make a resource for fans, I understand what they want to see on it. When you speak the same language with your audience, you will be successful.
- Do you cooperate with the sites of sports clubs?
- Some of them post a link to our site for free, with some we cooperate for a fee.
- Where do you get video resources for your site?
- We have concluded an agreement on obtaining broadcasting rights from NTV-Plus.
- Why do not you advertise in videos?
- Championship.TV - test project, launched only in August. We are planning to advertise in commercials next year.
Development and development of a successful Internet project is work, knowledge, ability to communicate with people and a little luck. However, before you start your project, you should look at the experience of those who have already passed this path. This will avoid many mistakes and develop more efficiently and successfully. Dmitry Sergeev, Champion.ru project manager, spoke about the experience of developing and promoting his project.
“The audience of Russian users is divided into those who love sports and those who do not know about its existence,” Dmitry Sergeyev described the mindset of the Runet audience. - “Championship.ru is designed for those who love sports. I dedicated more than four years to this project. ”
')
“There is a large segment - sports Runet. Tops the list of sports Internet resources "Sport-Express". We go in second place. Competitors follow us with a significant lag. Currently our audience is about two million unique users per month.
How and with what did we start? The project was conceived by me personally. At the same time, I worked offline (although initially I left the Internet - I was engaged in online advertising). Initially, I did a project without a clear business plan, more precisely, having it only in my head. First of all, I wanted to make a project for people, and that is why people went to this project.
Three times I tried to run Champion.ru. For the third time I came to Pavel Golovin, who as a result became my partner and co-investor. At that time he already had a project dedicated to European football - Fnews.ru. I offered him to make a project about Russian football on the basis of the engine of his site. We agreed with several outsourcers and started. The mechanism of operation was then simple - we were looking for sports news on various resources and published them on our website with reference to the source. Then it was allowed by law. We opened on March 11, 2005, and at first we were not particularly paid attention to. As I said, at first we had two projects - Fnews.ru and Champion.ru. Then we combined them. We approached the World Cup in 2006 by thoroughly preparing ourselves. This allowed us to break a big score - we have formed a large audience. After that, we did not dwell on the reprint of other people's news and began to actively increase the staff of our own authors. Our experts also began to translate news from foreign news sources. Our unique difference from other similar projects at that time was the availability of a database of sports statistics.
In the autumn of 2006, the Russian football championship ended, and we had to decide where to go next. It was that autumn that Gazeta.ru was suing us (they retroactively changed the agreement on the use of materials from their website and we were found guilty of copyright infringement). From that moment on, other sports sources began to choke us. In order to somehow secure ourselves, we became the official media with the right to quote. But even this only partially helped, and we realized that hard times were coming. It was at that moment that I was approached from a large company SUP Fabrik and offered to develop their sports project. I agreed only on the condition that I would go to them with my project. As a result, SUP bought Championat.ru. Of course, initially in SUP there was an opinion that Champion.ru was just a by-product, unlike LiveJournal. Therefore, we decided to slightly separate from them in terms of formulating our own policies, while remaining their project. Over time, the SUP began to realize that Championat.ru is a successful project. Thus, at present, SUP has three major projects - LiveJournal, Gazeta.ru and Championat.ru.
Then we began to open blogs using LiveJournal service. Blogs athletes, sports figures. I myself would not have thought of this - this is the idea of the SUP leadership. This was done in order to increase the intersection of the audience of projects SUP. However, directly for Championat.ru it is not entirely profitable - after all, in fact, we are losing a part of the audience that goes to blogs. And we cannot provide advertisers with advantageous statistics showing us.
In our plans for the near future to change the design and structure of the site. We also plan to launch sports Internet TV - Championship.TV and an online game based on real sports statistics. In addition to football, we began to develop in the direction of the multisports portal. Many advertisers were afraid of being sharpened specifically for football fans. They thought that these fans were interested only in specific products, such as beer. Now advertisers are calm - they see that we have sections dedicated to other sports and, thus, we are more attractive for advertising. But still, the proportion of football fans on our site is about 80 percent of the entire audience. ”
During the lecture, Dmitry Sergeev answered a number of questions from the audience.
- How many people do you have?
- The office currently employs about 35 people. Outside the office - about 60. Although people outside the office may receive a slight compensation.
- How can you explain the popularity of the resource?
- I'm just a big fan of football and other sports. When I make a resource for fans, I understand what they want to see on it. When you speak the same language with your audience, you will be successful.
- Do you cooperate with the sites of sports clubs?
- Some of them post a link to our site for free, with some we cooperate for a fee.
- Where do you get video resources for your site?
- We have concluded an agreement on obtaining broadcasting rights from NTV-Plus.
- Why do not you advertise in videos?
- Championship.TV - test project, launched only in August. We are planning to advertise in commercials next year.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/46154/
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