Improving Sports Channels

TotalGP.com

Objective

To create compelling content that drives significant traffic through to the venture and generates substantial income for PA Sporting Life and Jordan F1.

Background: Sporting Life – the partner of choice

We are innovative. We were the first UK sports website to launch (in 1997) and we continue the trend with leading edge product development. This included Europe’s first ever live racing webcast in February from Ascot.

We are immediate. Our live coverage is unparalleled. We have an array of desktop scoreboard, vidiprinters and tickers that mean our users get all the news and all the results first. Bar none.

We are authoritative. Our parent company, the Press Association, is one of the world’s most respected sources for sports news. Add this to our breadth of coverage and we have become the �website of record’ for sports fans.

Our aim is to be the leading website worldwide for the provision of information about UK sport. We believe that our maxim of being innovative, immediate and authoritative will allow us to achieve this goal.

We currently achieve an average of around 15 million page impressions a month – without, to date, having spent a penny on advertising. The next twelve months will see us improve that figure to 30 million, with a multi-million sum to be spent on promoting our newly-designed site, which went live in March. This will clearly have benefits for all of our partners and particularly other sites to which we drive traffic.

Although we are a multi-sports website, our coverage and content is superior to that found on many specialist sites – this is why up to one million people come to our site every month, with around one third of this figure coming from outside the UK. Our relationship with the Press Association, our parent company and the world’s most respected source for sporting information, means that we are able to bring more news to our users faster than our competitors.

Outline – TotalGP.com (or alternative name)

A site designed to become the natural home for British grand prix fans; secondary audience grand prix fans worldwide.

TotalGP.com will take the best elements available to each contributor and merge them to create a specialist F1 site capable of generating significant and multiple revenue streams. Specifically, these are the reliability of the Tote and Totalbet brand names, crucial factors in creating an environment of trust in the internet marketplace; the innovative, immediate and authoritative nature of news, stats, profiles and other contents from sportinglife.com; the strength of the Jordan band name, the visibility of key figures at Jordan and the inside Formula 1 knowledge and know-how brought by one of the world’s leading racing teams.

The use of a unique, new URL – such as TotalGP.com – gives both partners the opportunity to promote the site as their �own’. Within the site, the content should be presented as supplied by Sporting Life in conjunction with Jordan.

This kind of relationship – where a �sponsor’ is seen to be providing content to the fan via an independent and respected news-gatherer, rather than exploiting the fan’s preference with a hard sale – is beneficial to all parties. Ultimately, it results in a more loyal user base, leading to higher retention rates and greater lifetime values.

Registration should be required to access the site. With high anticipated traffic levels, this data would become a very valuable resource. Perhaps more importantly, with Ts and Cs established from day one, there would be no obstacles in the way of an impulse bet or buy – these would be literally one click away and could be �pushed’ at any time.

Revenue

The site would have three revenue streams:

1) Betting, provided by Totalbet on all Formua One events. Dedicated marketmakers could, potentially, create a variety of bets, from standard race winners, pole position winners and so on through to leaders at the end of nominated laps, individual ’match’ bets between particular teams and drivers (as we currently see in golf betting) and who will be the next driver to retire. These would ideally take advantage of the live nature of the medium and be monitored following live in-race coverage on site.

2) E-commerce. As well as using the site as a mechanism for direct sales of Jordan merchandise, Sporting Life can provide