TV Sports Markets Generates 7-Figures with Group Subscriptions to PDF Newsletters

TV Sports Markets (TVSM) started a newsletter business in 1997, and has been able to thrive while transitioning to a digital-only (PDF) edition in

TV Sports Markets (TVSM) started a newsletter business in 1997, and has been able to thrive while transitioning to a digital-only (PDF) edition in 2008. Chief Executive Julian Turner spoke with us about how the TVSM generates 7-figure revenues by selling only group subscriptions –despite having a less than optimized site. Plus, learn about TVSM’s tiered pricing system, how it adds subscribers by data-mining its existing subscriber base, and its plans to adapt to market changes. This is a great Case Study for any B2B sites looking to sell more group subscriptions or create a lucrative PDF e-newsletter business.

Company Profile

Founded: July 1997 in print; digital (PDF) in 2005; PDF-only since 2008.
Parent Company: Electric Word
No. of Publications: 3
Employees: 7 full-time
Business Model: Hybrid (group subscriptions, consulting, advertising)
Paying Subscribers: 120 group subscriptions, 1,200 individual users
Location: London, UK
Website: http://www.sportbusiness.com/tv-sports-markets

Target Market

TV Sports Markets attracts professionals who are interested in trading audio and visual rights to major sporting events. Both buyers and sellers of the trade want to know deal notes for past and ongoing trades since the only way associations can afford to pay multi-million winner jackpots is by signing lucrative international deals to broadcast events.

Most of the buyers are in the television industry, but some can be from radio or even broadband cable companies, like British Telecom, that are looking to stream sports events online. The sellers are world sports federations that own the rights to major competitions — associations like the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, and the International Cricket Association (on a global scale, cricket is bigger than baseball).

Content

TV Sports Markets publishes hard-to-get, specialist information on the business of television sport. Its PDF newsletter is published on a bi-weekly basis, and contains both data and analysis presented in a direct and jargon-free style.

TVSM also sends daily news alerts via email. These alerts require a paid subscription.

TVSM’s website only went live in April of this year, and contains some free content, usually updated once a week.

The PDF newsletter and daily email alerts are pay-worthy mainly because the information is not available anywhere else. In order to compile a database of deal prices and transaction data, which will be harnessed into a new data product, TV Sports Markets does not let subscribers access back issues published before their subscription start date.

With 15 years in the industry, TV Sports Markets has long-standing relationships with buyers and sellers, and develops its stories through “old-fashioned investigative journalism,” says Turner. This requires talking to sources on the phone, mining data and financial spreadsheets.

“People are willing to share off the record if they get something,” says Turner, and that something is often information on other deals.

Given the publication’s deep roots in the industry, it’s also looking to start up two alternate products — the aforementioned data product and another publication called Sports Sponsorship Insider, which would cover sports sponsorship deals.

Revenues

TV Sports Markets generates about £800,000 (about $1.2 million) annually.

About 75% of that comes from group subscriptions to the PDF newsletter. TVSM also does some consulting (about 16% of revenues) and takes advertising for special reports and briefings (around 9%).

The group subscription price is customized for each client, and based on three tiered factors:

    1. The number of users per company subscriber.
    2. Which geographic market the company in operating in (i.e., companies operating in South America typically don’t have as much money as European companies)
    3. The company’s role in the market. Broadcasters typically have more money than consultants advising the industry. Some companies play multiple roles, and the more roles they play, the more TV Sports Markets can charge for their information.

Group subscriptions can run the gamut from £1,000 for 1 user to £40,000 for 88 users.

Marketing Tactics

TVSM acquires new subscribers to its PDF newsletter through four main sources:

    1. Classic lead generation by sales staff.
    2. Upselling from lower-valued products. For example, Electric Word also publishers Sports Business International magazine, which has a broader subscriber base.
    3. Trade shows and word-of-mouth. Usually TVSM will have a booth at industry trade shows, which they use as a base to distribute materials. It will also try to get its Editor on a speaker panel. And for the first time this year, TVSM ran its own side event during a conference — a special TVSM briefing on deals — that got a lot of prospects attending.

      “It’s genuinely a small universe,” Turner said of the sports rights market.” It’s not like a general business info site. There’s a known pool of people we haven’t been able to persuade, so sales [staff] are working on individual people, as people move from one company to another.”

    4. The publication is also able to grow it subscriber numbers by mining existing group subscriptions, turning a 3-user subscription into a 36-user one, for example. They use tracking software (see Vendors & Technology) to note which subscribers are forwarding their PDF newsletters to non-users. They also allow an unlimited number of user registrations for the PDF newsletter through their Web form (i.e., instead of allowing a limited number of registered users based on site license pricing). This way, a subscriber who says it wants eight users will inevitably sign up more, and when it comes time to renew, TVSM charges according to the current user base.

Website + SEO
The TVSM website is not a critical part of the company’s acquisition strategy at this time, at thus, is not particularly optimized. It contains a clunky format, with both the right and left columns containing display ads that hope to convert visitors to PDF newsletter subscribers.  There’s a definite need to increase the site’s search engine optimization.

Social Media
TVSM does have a Twitter presence, albeit with a small number of followers.  The division (Sports Business Group) has a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook. While social media is not a significant acquisition or conversion tactic for TVSM, what we did like was their use of the cover photo space on Facebook to advertise their upcoming event (In fact, we copied this idea for our own Facebook page, and inserted a hyperlink to our storefront in the image description.)

Conversion Tactics

Most of TVSM’s prospects are converted through sales calls, during which sales staff will offer a free two-week trial of the PDF newsletter (which usually results in prospects getting two newsletters during that time).

TVSM’s website helps with these conversions, with free articles and an Editor’s blog that lets prospects get a taste for the content. The website also accepts the user registrations for group subscriptions (described above), which helps convert smaller accounts into larger ones.

The sales staff will take a credit card if a prospect offers it, but overwhelmingly, subscribers are invoiced.

Retention Tactics

While Turner would not reveal TVSM’s actual retention rate, he said it was high and above the standard benchmark of 80%-90%. The average account lifetime is about 10 years.

Turner says starting the daily news briefing has been an effective retention tactic, and also solved a previous problem of occasionally getting “beat” on news stories by mainstream business publications. And, as mentioned above, the Web form registration and PDF tracking software are successful retention and renewal devices.

Cross Sells & Upsells

TVSM cross-sells its consulting services by reaching out to subscribers who can’t find the information they’re looking for and call TVSM asking for help. New entrants into the TV sports rights market are also good prospects, says Turner.

TVSM is also starting to be more pro-active about generating consulting revenue by mining its own database and reporters’ knowledgebase and sources for when rights are up for renewal, and then reaching out to advise stakeholders on re-negotiations.

About Julian Turner

|image6|Julian Turner has 25 years of experience in subscription publishing, starting out with specialist magazines and eventually graduating to national newspapers and a stint at Euromoney Institutional Investor. However, he felt that a lot of companies weren’t getting the business model right, and started Electric Word “to prove a point.” And in fact, Electric Word now has many types of revenue streams other than subscription content, including conferences, consulting and advertising.

“The most important thing is the depth of your market understanding and customer needs in your market,” Turner says of his biggest lesson learned.

When asked what his advice would be for other subscription publishers, Turner said, “Scale is really important. I think you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to be a small little lifestyle business where you can make a living around an area and do that successfully (and that’s a completely valid choice). If you’re trying to build a bigger business, then going into markets with genuine scale is really important. And doing fewer things that are more profitable is better than doing many things with smaller scale and less profitable.”

Vendors & Technology

Hosting — UKFast and Linode
http://www.ukfast.co.uk/
https://www.linode.com/

Payment processing — THINK (for invoices) then BACS; Ocius/VeriFone (check or credit card)
http://www.thinksubscription.com/
http://www.bacs.co.uk/Bacs/Corporate/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.ocius.net/transaction-processing.aspx
http://www.verifone.com/

Email management & email analytics — Adestra
http://www.adestra.com/

PDF tracking — Vitrium
http://www.vitrium.com/

Content management — Drupal
https://drupal.org/

Analytics — SRS (on SQL fulfillment database), Google analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Insider Analysis

TV Sports Markets has adopted a unique content model for an industry that one would think would be more digitally-savvy. However, their growing revenues and impressive retention rate demonstrate that even the most technically-savvy audiences will sometimes prefer old-school publishing media. We’re impressed that they have such a thriving digital-only business for years without having an actual website until recently. We also like that they’re using old-school journalism techniques to get scoops on deal information not available elsewhere. And we think it’s brilliant that they’re able to grow their subscriber base simply by upselling existing group subscriptions into larger accounts.

Obviously, TVSM has vast areas of improvement when it comes to their site design. Everything from content layout to their subscribe buttons are far from optimized, and we recommend they review our Paywall Optimization Toolkit for how to immediately implement best practices. They should also create an email newsletter for their Editor’s blog, since it’ll be easier to convert visitors once they have an opt-in email list. Also, since many websites and Internet companies are looking to enter into their industry, they should prioritize SEO and other discovery methods since many new prospects will not have heard of them (and these new prospects are likely more search-reliant for industry information than existing subscribers).

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