Video! Columns! Fantasy! Sports sites set programming strategies aimed at boosting consumer traffic and in turn attracting more ad dollars

By ERIC FISHER

Staff writer www.sportsbusinessjournal.com

This year’s March Madness On Demand, offered up by CBSSports.com, was a bona fide, no-doubt hit.

Traffic more than doubled from 2007 to 4.76 million unique users, advertising revenue soared to more than $23 million, and cultural relevance from the offering spiked thanks to a series of related deals that placed tournament-related content in hot spots like Facebook.

But after all the time-honored watercooler talk and late-night jokes about how March Madness corrodes the national GDP, those raw online numbers pale in comparison to what happens on Mondays during the fall.

It is during those times when tens of millions of sports fans collectively log on to that same CBSSports.com as well as ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, FoxSports.com, SI.com and scores of other sites to catch up on NFL action, track their fantasy teams, debate and discuss the prior weekend’s sports action, and engage in a host of other activities.

“Daytime is prime time for us, and there’s simply never a lack of appetite for NFL content — ever,” said Ed Bunnell, Fox Sports Interactive vice president for programming and product development. “The online version of ‘The OT’ [Fox Sports’ NFL postgame TV show] is a big, big Monday vehicle for us, and then it spills right over into fantasy, our analysis and all our other coverage.”

Added John Kosner, ESPN senior vice president and general manager of digital media, “This August-September-October period is such a huge time for us, a crucial time. We get traffic spikes at other periods and around big events, certainly in March during tournament time, for example. But football is definitely the No. 1 thing for us.”

That dynamic is representative of several prevailing factors: the NFL’s status as the No. 1 traffic driver in online sports, with most major sites gleaning 25 to 30 percent of their total annual traffic from content relating to that league; the seasonality of football; a geographic spread for many sports sites that draws disproportionately from key NFL and college football markets; and the fact that most sports-related traffic happens during daytime work hours.

But as the Internet and the business models based upon it continue to mature, each of the major U.S.-based sports sites are actively developing new programming strategies based heavily on research data and newly developed metrics that seek to spread that white-hot Monday fan interest across the week and into a steadier and ideally larger flow of traffic and advertising revenue.

Some of those ventures involve simply extracting more content from existing name-brand talent, such as Peter King’s Tuesday columns and Thursday game previews on SI.com to complement his franchise product, “Monday Morning Quarterback,” or Bill Simmons podcasting on ESPN.com to add to his regular, highly read print columns. Other sites are extending their reach by serving fans of niche sports with additional content in those areas, also known in Internet circles as “the long tail.”

“Peter King and the ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ is obviously big, big appointment viewing for us, and is still our No. 1 overall destination. But we’ve been very focused on having a strong lineup across all seven days of the week, and previewing games, for example, is just as important as breaking them down afterward,” said Jeff Price, SI Digital president.

“We now have a very deep bench with guys like Don Banks, Dr. Z, of course, and his power ratings, our scout Bucky Brooks and so forth. So the traffic gap between Peter and the others is now a lot narrower than you would think. And it’s not just football, either. We’re getting huge engagement from people like [baseball writers] Tom Verducci and Jon Heyman,” Price said.

Video is popular at ESPN.com, but isn’t a

strong traffic generator at most sports sites.

The last three years have seen an unprecedented explosion in online video, with high-profile aggregators such as the Google-owned YouTube, Joost and retail outlets such as iTunes standing along the mainline sports sites and league-controlled portals.

But for all that much-ballyhooed growth and the continued rise of broadband Internet connections, online sports video generally accounts for about 10 to 20 percent of the traffic among the major sites, with only a select few spots such as ESPN.com and MLB.com reaching meaningfully beyond that mark.

Those averages for sports sites at large, despite the heavy fan passion in which they trade, actually under-index compared with global Internet traffic figures compiled by Cisco. The Internet backbone company estimates that 22 percent of total worldwide Internet traffic in 2007 was devoted to video, with the figure set to rise to 32 percent by the end of this year.

Turnkey Sports Poll
The following are results of the Turnkey Sports Poll taken in September. The survey covered more than 1,100 senior-level sports industry executives spanning professional and college sports.
What would you say has been the most significant development in online sports over the past year?
Streaming video of games and highlights	59.35%
Proliferation of fan and player blogs	13.08%
Legal decision that intellectual property rights do not apply to statistics used in fantasy sports	11.68%
Social networking	6.07%
The decline of dedicated sports reporters at newspapers	6.07%
No response/Not sure	3.74%
Which mainstream sports news site offers the best content?
ESPN.com	64.49%
FoxSports.com	6.54%
YahooSports.com	6.07%
SI.com	5.61%
SportsLine.com (CBS)	4.21%
SportingNews.com	2.34%
NBCSports.com	0.00%
Other	1.87%
No response/Not sure	8.88%
What Internet site do you most often wish you had thought of first:
Google	53.27%
eBay	21.03%
YouTube	9.81%
Facebook	5.61%
Amazon	4.67%
MySpace	0.93%
Yahoo!	0.93%
Other	0.47%
No response/Not sure	3.27%
Source: Turnkey Sports & Entertainment in conjunction with SportsBusiness Journal. Turnkey Intelligence specializes in research, measurement and lead generation for brands and properties. Visit www.turnkeyse.com.

There are several reasons for the gap between the sports number and the total global figure. The at-work element of much of the current online sports media consumption leads millions of users to seek out “quiet” content such as news, statistics and fantasy material that is not disruptive in group settings.

Some major sites such as SI.com do not have fully fledged video content strategies, and have instead devoted their resources to other areas such as original reporting, social networking and fantasy sports.

And most high-end video, such as baseball’s MLB.TV out-of-market package, is sold on a subscription basis where raw usage may perhaps be lower but yields a more stable and sustainable economic model.

“Video itself is not driving the business necessarily,” said Chris Russo, chairman and CEO of Fantasy Sports Ventures and a digital media consultant. “It’s definitely still early days.”

Also at issue are concerns over video quality and bandwidth in which some users, even with high-speed Internet connections, cannot process clips in a seamless fashion. “The bandwidth issue is a short-term one, but one we’re certainly dealing with at present,” said Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo! Sports & Entertainment vice president and general manager. “Accessibility, relevance, quality, they’re all key factors as well. You can’t just put up whatever and expect people to consume it just because it’s video. It’s why we’re making a big investment in video, but it’s a long-term play for us.”

The last two years have also seen a major evolution in how Internet inventory is sold. Not long ago, many online sales were not at all integrated and were sold on a simple display basis.

The foremost buzzword now is multiplatform, with online sites now aggressively selling integrated packages that seek to move beyond simple purchase of inventory into fully fledged digital marketing efforts that blend online, mobile and, if possible, TV. And building off of title rights such as GMC’s sponsorship of King’s “Monday Morning Quarterback” three years ago, dedicated sponsorships of specific content elements also continue to grow.

But rather than simply purchasing title rights to specific writers, those dedicated buys are now focusing more on creating new content elements where the sponsor can be even more deeply involved, and in many cases, leverage other buys across the same outlet or sport.

Aiding those sales is a new wealth of metrics to evaluate the execution and placement of marketing campaigns. Third-party, panel-based data, the source of bitter industry debates for many months, remains something of a quagmire and generally is seen as something that provides value only on a raw directional basis. But beyond those monthly figures, audited internal server figures, numbers from ad-serving outfits, and a new realm of blended materials are all gaining favor and are being used increasingly to sell against.

ESPN and NBC, most notably, are actively developing blended user consumption data that either combines TV and Internet audiences, or in the case of specifically online statistics, mixes reach-based numbers such as unique users with engagement-based numbers such as time spent online. In ESPN’s emerging methodologies, other share-based data is also included.

“Raw uniques is such a blunt instrument,” said David Coletti, senior director of digital media research for ESPN, which is seeking industry consensus around some of its metrics formulas. “The digital space is ready for something more sophisticated. You’re certainly seeing marketers already get beyond just raw uniques in developing their programs, but we’re after a better set of tools and a much better level of transparency.”

Not surprisingly, the current big content and marketing push among sports sites is all around social networking. Already several years in the making, recent months have seen a marked uptick in social media-based ventures such as SI.com’s alliance with Citizen Sports Network on Facebook; the rise of Atomic Moguls, the brainchild of former NBA executive Brenda Spoonemore that also leverages the power of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo; the launch of SportsFanLive by former Yahoo! executive David Katz; and enhanced blogging and chat entries from ESPN, CBSSports.com and others.

The thought process behind the moves also is not difficult to understand: Capturing the under-25 audience is vital for the long-term survival of any sports property and requires a far different programming strategy than a traditional mix of stories, stats and videos.

“Everybody is trying to figure that out, and there’s certainly a ton of energy there,” Russo said. “The only one that’s truly succeeded to date is fantasy, and that’s obviously where [Fantasy Sports Ventures] has invested its energies, but you’re going to see more experiments, more moves into this space. The key is going to be in the execution and how real and impactful those offerings are.”