As Jim White called time on this record breaking summer transfer window, on August 31st, a collective sigh of relief could be heard amongst website publishers far and wide. The last three months have been one heavy and slog without question – as webmasters fight it out to get their content seen in this saturated market.
Every year it gets tougher to differentiate, as many publishers plagiarize each other’s proven methods and do very little to entertain their audiences. Snack Media has worked hard to buck this trend throughout the past few months and we believe it is the only way to grow the sites organically and therefore not having to rely heavily on aggregators like NewsNow – or vast social media spend. The early signs in 2017 have proved us right with direct traffic to our platforms increasing by 27% for the duration of the transfer window.
There are many publishers out in the marketplace – most notably Squawka who work well and visualize their content throughout providing greater depth and insight. They have found their niche in this space, something that we have attempted to establish with our flagship publisher, Football FanCast. This website has had a massive overhaul in the last 12 months – with the introduction of new innovative features, infographics and video content to enhance our analysis and give the online audience more than click. The transfer season is the optimum time to showcase new content themes – given how busy football websites are during this period of time. Such features as ‘Transfer in Numbers’, ‘Transfer Focus’ and ‘Player Zone’ – whilst we also lent on our relationship with Football Manager have ensured that we have been able to produce an array of unique content to report these three crazy months.
Some examples below:
VIDEO: What can Arsenal fans expect from Lacazette?
Pochettino’s transfer dilemma
Summer transfer comparisons
EFL bargain hunters
We have found the move of more infographic-based content has also enhanced social referrals, as we can market it via them opposed to the rich images that were always the norm prior to this period.
The basic learning we have taken out of the past few months is that evolving your content strategy around peak times of the year has a measurable impact on website traffic, social referrals and engagement levels. Offering the public a differentiate to the tired old content delivery methods that some publishers continually churn out has paid dividends for Snack Media – who have subsequently enjoyed record traffic levels and revenues as a result. It is clear that web audiences are a discerning bunch and want a lot more for their click than just 150 words of rehashed click-bait garbage that so many webmasters were putting out on a daily basis throughout the transfer window. They say content is king in this industry and looking at our 22m monthly uniques average over the last 3 months – we appear to be satisfying the masses.
