As footballers head to the beach after a hard-fought season, the same cannot be said of the football publisher community as the transfer season well and truly kicks in.
The next three months are arguably the most profitable time of the year for businesses within our sector, as page views reach unprecedented levels.
With no regular football on show, supporters quench their insatiable thirst by frequenting various online outlets in the hope of any piece of news, or gossip, from their respective clubs. At this time of year there is no shortage of speculation or transfer tittle tattle, therefore publishers do everything they can to offer extended opinion and analysis to breaking stories to ensure they remain competitive within these online conversations. It can resemble the wild west at times, such is the oversaturated market place we are operating in.
At Snack Media, we adopt a different strategy to most publishers, as we adopt sanity over vanity when it comes to garnering page views. Whilst the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United are huge football clubs and generate a large amount of hits to our websites their international following means that for all the tens of thousands of page views their articles would generate, it would ultimately fail to deliver the same levels of revenue of say a Tottenham or Everton article.
That’s not to say we wouldn’t cover news or generate features around these clubs, but we would only ever dedicate around 10-15% of our content strategy to them.
If the first three weeks of the transfer window is anything to go by then I genuinely believe it will be a record breaking one, not only in terms of the transfer fees that are being paid out, but for website audiences in general.
If we take the first two weeks as an example, we at Snack Media are already enjoying a 32% increase from a year on year perspective and the transfer season has only just started.
The fight for online audiences has commenced and we are certainly ready for battle.
