Moving Beyond Advertising - Sports Tickets
28 Feb
Posted by: Bryan Bennett in: Advertising, FanSection, Sports
The challenges faced by the interactive advertising industry this year have been well documented by everyone from TechCrunch just a few days ago to Henry Blodget several months ago. Consumer Internet companies, and media companies in general, are likely facing a tough year when it comes to ad sales. At Watercooler, we’re not immune to those macro economic issues, but we’ve managed our business in such a way that we’ll be able to weather this financial tsunami.
That doesn’t mean we’re not concerned. And it certainly doesn’t mean we’re content with our predominantly ad-supported business model. We’re actively exploring a variety of ways that we can monetize the 30 million plus registered users we’ve accumulated in our online fan communities over the last two years.
We’ve previously announced a couple of alternative revenue sources including a research partnership with SmithGeiger and merchandise deal with Delivery Agent on the TV side of the business, and we’ve had a partnership with 4INFO for a while on the sports side.
But one thing we’ve always wanted to do with our sports communities is sell tickets. It’s an obvious opportunity as we have over 18 million sports fans that have specifically identified themselves as fans of a particular team. Those fans are a potential gold mine for the right ticket promotions. Enter the Los Angeles Clippers and the New York Islanders. Those are just the first two teams that we’ve inked agreements with to push tickets this season. So far we’ve promoted two games for the Clippers with decent success based on our initial forecasts. Our third game is on Monday 3/2 which is also our first game for the Islanders (ticket page shown below).
At the same time, we’re proactively reaching out to a variety of teams across the NBA, NHL, and MLS, with plans to do some similar things for the NFL later. We’re also going to be making some product changes in March that will integrate ticket promotions into the normal user experience. And finally, we’re very close to announcing an merchandising deal with a leading online sports apparel company. That’s just one more prong in our revenue model as we continue to expand beyond advertising.
[...] Friday I wrote a blog post about how FanSection is moving into ticket sales to expand our revenue model beyond online advertising. At the time, I alluded to the fact that we [...]
[...] few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how we’re starting to incorporate ticket sales into our FanSection sports communities to diversify our revenue streams beyond online advertising. While working with individual [...]