Dmitry Navosha: “The sports segment of the Runet in the last year and a half has been growing at a faster pace”
Sports.ru is the oldest professional sports internet project in Russia, it has existed since December 1, 1998. During the first 7-8 years of its existence, it was a kind of cooperative of sports journalists (from Vasily Utkin to the chief editor of the magazine PROsport Stanislav Gridasov), who supported the project, which is called “for the soul”. Over the past two years, Sports.ru has turned into the main web-dance website about sports, which daily gathers an audience of over 100 thousand people and every year various industry awards (the last in November 2008 was the Runet Award).
Co-owner and project manager Dmitry Navosha was also a journalist with GQ, Newsweek and other publications, as well as an editor in PROSPORT and Afisha-Mir magazines. Since the summer of 2006, Dmitry has been developing Sports.ru, and also regularly comes to share his experience with students of the State University of Management. His last lecture was devoted to major trends in the Russian sports Internet.
“The sports segment of the Runet in the last year and a half has been growing at a faster pace,” says Dmitry Navosh. “If it were not for the overwhelming development of social networks, one could say that the most interesting events took place in the sports segment of the Russian Internet in 2008. There are two reasons for this growth. One is the general increase in the audience’s interest in sports, primarily due to the Olympics and all these last year’s success of the Russian national football and hockey teams, as well as Zenit. Another reason is the shock pace of the development of sports media, so that this growing interest in sports has been satisfied, above all, on the Internet, and not in other media. ”
Over the year, from September 2007 to September 2008, the monthly audience of sports sites, according to Liveinternet, grew by 73 percent, that is, almost a third more than in adjacent segments - “entertainment”, “travel”, “news and mass media".
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“If we count in pageviews, this growth would be even more impressive - 83 percent,” says Dmitry. “Leading sports sites have significantly increased this year both the amount of content, quality, and its diversity; in terms of the growth of all these parameters, the past year for the sports Internet costs three or four others. Someone grew a little faster, someone a little slower - Sports.ru, for example, doubled. But if you take the top five, which includes Sport-Express, Sportbox.ru, Championat.ru and Eurosport.ru, everyone’s growth was very decent. ”
Analyzing the reasons for the explosive growth of sports sites last year, Dmitry Navosha outlined five main trends that predetermined it.
• Growth in the share of original content
“If at the first stage sports sites, like other online media, were almost exclusively“ processors ”of other people's content, now most of them create“ added value ”to the news feed at the expense of their own journalists and reviewers. And if, for example, in many of its own news about Russian football, many still struggle to compete with Sport Express, which has an extensive corset, for example, in the coverage of European football Sports.ru with its strong team of authors, which includes quite a few NTV Plus employees are clearly number one. In general, the emergence of many cool offline journalists among the authors of Internet sites is part of this trend. ”
• Aggressive marketing
“In 2008, at least three of the five leading sports sites were advertised on television - even if we ignore Sportbox.ru, which belongs to television and therefore is promoted by the Sport channel with all its might. But before any one of the sports sites could not afford television advertising. This is probably not the most obvious and effective way to promote online media, especially when you have to pay for advertising. But this fact fully characterizes the unprecedented marketing activity of sports online media on all possible fronts - from outdoor advertising and television to the purchase of traffic. Perhaps even unnecessary, given the sharp slowdown in the growth rate of the advertising market last fall. ”
• Blogs and celebrities conferences
“Sports.ru is developing without massive advertising and does not buy traffic,” says Dmitry Navosh. - “We prefer to spend money on interesting content. But immediately after the arrival of the new team on the site, at the end of 2006, we came up with a few pieces, thanks to which good content begins to promote itself. First of all, these are blogs and conferences of famous athletes and coaches.
The first blog of a professional athlete in Russia is the blog of Spartak legend Andrei Tikhonov on Sports.ru, and the first blog of a professional coach was opened by Ettore Messina , an Italian expert, thanks to whom CSKA basketball has been the best team in Europe for many years. Each of the stellar blogs and conferences - and we opened dozens - gave us not only interesting content, but also a new audience, who learned about us through word of mouth, since the appearance of such serious people on the Internet caused a serious resonance. This idea worked so well that almost all competitors quickly adopted it, and now I can responsibly say that athletes and coaches are not involved in such intensive communication with readers in the US or in Western European countries as in Russia.
By the way, if at first we had to mollify athletes and coaches to open blogs, to convince and explain, now some of them themselves turn to us with such an idea. And someone even actively participates in the discussion in the comments - for example, coach of the South Yuzhny Boris Sobkin ”.
• Development of online and statistics
“Interactive is not the only trump card of the Internet as compared to paper media, speed is equally important. The development of online and statistics is another parameter in which almost all the leading websites have been added. Sports.ru, in particular, implemented the first in Russia online services that do not require page reloading - thanks to the use of Java and Flash. The second feature of Sports.ru is professional football statistics, which is purchased from the company InStat Football, which prepares this data for coaches and breeders. That is, now our readers can operate not only with traditional parameters of heads and cards, but also with data on strikes, selections, strokes, fouls - up to strikes the barbell. The last parameter holder last year, if anyone does not know, was Krylya forward Yevgeny Savin. ”
• Video content
“Immediately on four major sports sites last year, one way or another, licensed video content appeared. But the video will largely become the event of 2009 - despite the meager growth of the video advertising market on the Internet. ”
“A direct consequence of the arms race unleashed by leading sports sites in 2008 was the increase in the entry threshold to this niche. Three years ago, the same Sports.ru could be among the most visited, having about two and a half permanent employees and developing more on enthusiasm than on money. Today, the project employs more than 25 employees, and dozens more - on freelancing. Now, newbie sites need either significant investments or some important competitive advantages to attract the attention of some serious sports audience, and it is better to have both together, like on the site Sportbox.ru. His “unique selling proposition” was live video broadcasts of a large number of sporting events, plus unlimited TV promo.
All other new sites - 7tv.ru, Sportweek.ru, Sportsdaily.ru and so on - could not compete with existing projects, despite support from related offline media. Simply repeating the steps of the leading websites is no longer enough - you need to offer something special. ”
“The revenue of online sports media in 2008 also grew at a good pace, primarily due to media advertising, which is the main source of income for everyone,” says Dmitry. - “It's nice that we managed to break the stereotypes of some advertisers, who represented sports fans as not quite washed up, picky public in stretched workouts, which is difficult to sell anything other than cheap beer. Sports.ru, for example, is focused primarily on an audience of 20-40 years old, advanced and educated, perhaps - somewhat pro-Western. And the TNS Gallup data now speaks for itself: 65 percent of Sports.ru readers have incomes above average, and 61 percent belong to the categories of “managers” and “specialists.” This allowed us to successfully attract advertising of automobile brands, which brought us 37 percent of annual revenue, and even advertising of banks.
Unfortunately, these segments of advertisers have suffered quite a lot from the crisis. Sports.ru continues to grow - only in February, our audience has grown by a quarter - and still remains attractive for advertisers, we manage to avoid a sharp drop. But a serious increase in revenue compared to last year’s, which we had hoped for before the crisis, cannot be expected. ”
“What will happen to the sports Internet next? On the one hand, it is clear that survival: everyone felt the decline in advertiser activity. But development, I think, will not stop, "- said the head of Sports.ru. - “We have already launched three projects this year - website personalization (users got unprecedented opportunities to customize it for themselves), video conferences with sports stars and Fantasy Football - this is a football manager in which you earn points depending on the performances chosen by you for my team of real players. The boom of such managers, it seems to me, could be one of the events of 2009. For example, in less than a month without special advertising we gathered almost 50 thousand participants. In my opinion, another trend of the coming year will be the introduction of paid services: sites have to move in this direction at least in order to reduce their dependence on advertising revenues.
The trend towards socialization of sports sites will increase. Firstly, the entire Internet is developing in this direction, and many sites today are partly social networks. On the same Sports.ru, all three Manchester United fans from the city of Novosibirsk can find each other by the parameters “geography” and “interests” - and, let's say, go together to drink beer. And secondly, now, when sites have no money to increase the amount of professional content, it will be reasonable to stimulate growth by user activity.
And, of course, the consumption of sports videos will increase. The audience is not just ready for this - it is waiting for it and even demands it, and if it does not wait for high-quality licensed video content, it uses pirated content. No matter how the situation develops on the market, there will be more and more sports videos on the Internet: progress cannot be reversed. ”
Co-owner and project manager Dmitry Navosha was also a journalist with GQ, Newsweek and other publications, as well as an editor in PROSPORT and Afisha-Mir magazines. Since the summer of 2006, Dmitry has been developing Sports.ru, and also regularly comes to share his experience with students of the State University of Management. His last lecture was devoted to major trends in the Russian sports Internet.
Interest growth
“The sports segment of the Runet in the last year and a half has been growing at a faster pace,” says Dmitry Navosh. “If it were not for the overwhelming development of social networks, one could say that the most interesting events took place in the sports segment of the Russian Internet in 2008. There are two reasons for this growth. One is the general increase in the audience’s interest in sports, primarily due to the Olympics and all these last year’s success of the Russian national football and hockey teams, as well as Zenit. Another reason is the shock pace of the development of sports media, so that this growing interest in sports has been satisfied, above all, on the Internet, and not in other media. ”
Over the year, from September 2007 to September 2008, the monthly audience of sports sites, according to Liveinternet, grew by 73 percent, that is, almost a third more than in adjacent segments - “entertainment”, “travel”, “news and mass media".
')
“If we count in pageviews, this growth would be even more impressive - 83 percent,” says Dmitry. “Leading sports sites have significantly increased this year both the amount of content, quality, and its diversity; in terms of the growth of all these parameters, the past year for the sports Internet costs three or four others. Someone grew a little faster, someone a little slower - Sports.ru, for example, doubled. But if you take the top five, which includes Sport-Express, Sportbox.ru, Championat.ru and Eurosport.ru, everyone’s growth was very decent. ”
Trends
Analyzing the reasons for the explosive growth of sports sites last year, Dmitry Navosha outlined five main trends that predetermined it.
• Growth in the share of original content
“If at the first stage sports sites, like other online media, were almost exclusively“ processors ”of other people's content, now most of them create“ added value ”to the news feed at the expense of their own journalists and reviewers. And if, for example, in many of its own news about Russian football, many still struggle to compete with Sport Express, which has an extensive corset, for example, in the coverage of European football Sports.ru with its strong team of authors, which includes quite a few NTV Plus employees are clearly number one. In general, the emergence of many cool offline journalists among the authors of Internet sites is part of this trend. ”
• Aggressive marketing
“In 2008, at least three of the five leading sports sites were advertised on television - even if we ignore Sportbox.ru, which belongs to television and therefore is promoted by the Sport channel with all its might. But before any one of the sports sites could not afford television advertising. This is probably not the most obvious and effective way to promote online media, especially when you have to pay for advertising. But this fact fully characterizes the unprecedented marketing activity of sports online media on all possible fronts - from outdoor advertising and television to the purchase of traffic. Perhaps even unnecessary, given the sharp slowdown in the growth rate of the advertising market last fall. ”
• Blogs and celebrities conferences
“Sports.ru is developing without massive advertising and does not buy traffic,” says Dmitry Navosh. - “We prefer to spend money on interesting content. But immediately after the arrival of the new team on the site, at the end of 2006, we came up with a few pieces, thanks to which good content begins to promote itself. First of all, these are blogs and conferences of famous athletes and coaches.
The first blog of a professional athlete in Russia is the blog of Spartak legend Andrei Tikhonov on Sports.ru, and the first blog of a professional coach was opened by Ettore Messina , an Italian expert, thanks to whom CSKA basketball has been the best team in Europe for many years. Each of the stellar blogs and conferences - and we opened dozens - gave us not only interesting content, but also a new audience, who learned about us through word of mouth, since the appearance of such serious people on the Internet caused a serious resonance. This idea worked so well that almost all competitors quickly adopted it, and now I can responsibly say that athletes and coaches are not involved in such intensive communication with readers in the US or in Western European countries as in Russia.
By the way, if at first we had to mollify athletes and coaches to open blogs, to convince and explain, now some of them themselves turn to us with such an idea. And someone even actively participates in the discussion in the comments - for example, coach of the South Yuzhny Boris Sobkin ”.
• Development of online and statistics
“Interactive is not the only trump card of the Internet as compared to paper media, speed is equally important. The development of online and statistics is another parameter in which almost all the leading websites have been added. Sports.ru, in particular, implemented the first in Russia online services that do not require page reloading - thanks to the use of Java and Flash. The second feature of Sports.ru is professional football statistics, which is purchased from the company InStat Football, which prepares this data for coaches and breeders. That is, now our readers can operate not only with traditional parameters of heads and cards, but also with data on strikes, selections, strokes, fouls - up to strikes the barbell. The last parameter holder last year, if anyone does not know, was Krylya forward Yevgeny Savin. ”
• Video content
“Immediately on four major sports sites last year, one way or another, licensed video content appeared. But the video will largely become the event of 2009 - despite the meager growth of the video advertising market on the Internet. ”
Entry threshold
“A direct consequence of the arms race unleashed by leading sports sites in 2008 was the increase in the entry threshold to this niche. Three years ago, the same Sports.ru could be among the most visited, having about two and a half permanent employees and developing more on enthusiasm than on money. Today, the project employs more than 25 employees, and dozens more - on freelancing. Now, newbie sites need either significant investments or some important competitive advantages to attract the attention of some serious sports audience, and it is better to have both together, like on the site Sportbox.ru. His “unique selling proposition” was live video broadcasts of a large number of sporting events, plus unlimited TV promo.
All other new sites - 7tv.ru, Sportweek.ru, Sportsdaily.ru and so on - could not compete with existing projects, despite support from related offline media. Simply repeating the steps of the leading websites is no longer enough - you need to offer something special. ”
Advertisers
“The revenue of online sports media in 2008 also grew at a good pace, primarily due to media advertising, which is the main source of income for everyone,” says Dmitry. - “It's nice that we managed to break the stereotypes of some advertisers, who represented sports fans as not quite washed up, picky public in stretched workouts, which is difficult to sell anything other than cheap beer. Sports.ru, for example, is focused primarily on an audience of 20-40 years old, advanced and educated, perhaps - somewhat pro-Western. And the TNS Gallup data now speaks for itself: 65 percent of Sports.ru readers have incomes above average, and 61 percent belong to the categories of “managers” and “specialists.” This allowed us to successfully attract advertising of automobile brands, which brought us 37 percent of annual revenue, and even advertising of banks.
Unfortunately, these segments of advertisers have suffered quite a lot from the crisis. Sports.ru continues to grow - only in February, our audience has grown by a quarter - and still remains attractive for advertisers, we manage to avoid a sharp drop. But a serious increase in revenue compared to last year’s, which we had hoped for before the crisis, cannot be expected. ”
Forecasts
“What will happen to the sports Internet next? On the one hand, it is clear that survival: everyone felt the decline in advertiser activity. But development, I think, will not stop, "- said the head of Sports.ru. - “We have already launched three projects this year - website personalization (users got unprecedented opportunities to customize it for themselves), video conferences with sports stars and Fantasy Football - this is a football manager in which you earn points depending on the performances chosen by you for my team of real players. The boom of such managers, it seems to me, could be one of the events of 2009. For example, in less than a month without special advertising we gathered almost 50 thousand participants. In my opinion, another trend of the coming year will be the introduction of paid services: sites have to move in this direction at least in order to reduce their dependence on advertising revenues.
The trend towards socialization of sports sites will increase. Firstly, the entire Internet is developing in this direction, and many sites today are partly social networks. On the same Sports.ru, all three Manchester United fans from the city of Novosibirsk can find each other by the parameters “geography” and “interests” - and, let's say, go together to drink beer. And secondly, now, when sites have no money to increase the amount of professional content, it will be reasonable to stimulate growth by user activity.
And, of course, the consumption of sports videos will increase. The audience is not just ready for this - it is waiting for it and even demands it, and if it does not wait for high-quality licensed video content, it uses pirated content. No matter how the situation develops on the market, there will be more and more sports videos on the Internet: progress cannot be reversed. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/56268/
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