Planet Sport Group's Managing Director of Publishing, Tim Satchell, discusses the strategies his team has implemented over the past 18 months that have engendered substantial growth for the sports media group in an industry that's had its fair share of struggles in recent years.
"Overall, comparing this year versus last year, we're having our best ever year for traffic, with last month [November] being our biggest ever revenue month. We're certainly happy with the way things are going."
The publishing industry as a majority collective has been facing widespread issues over the past 12–18 months. How is Planet Sport Group performing?
Digital publishing has been facing a tough year. Facebook's been cutting back on the number of referrals it makes, while Google's been working on algorithm updates, AI searches, and cookie deprecations that have hit some publishers. There's been quite a few headwinds.
Our owned and operated sites have been doing very well despite this, so our results have been good this year. We had our biggest ever traffic month in July of 2024, helped by the British Grand Prix, the Rugby Union Internationals, and of course the Euros.
Overall, comparing 2024 to the previous year, we had our best year for traffic, with November being our biggest ever revenue month. We're certainly happy with the way things are going.
That said, we’ve still got a lot of things to do outside of our owned and operated sites. Social media, podcasts, and apps all require a lot more time, focus, and investment in order to reach sports fans wherever they consume their content.
One step forward we've taken recently is the purchase of YouTube channel The F1 Word, which has an audience of over 100,000 subscribers. Sean Cullingford [owner of The F1 Word] is a marvellous asset who’s going to play a big role in expanding our Formula 1 coverage on YouTube.
"We've been systematically investing in experienced journalists, along with original and exclusive interview content."
Planet Football is also an area of focus for social media. The title is all about trivia and quizzes, which football fans famously love. We rank highly for quizzes, so that's an area that we can grow in on social media. We had more than 10 million views last month on YouTube shorts and TikTok, which is great for short form content. Long-form video is where we're heading next with Planet Football.
What advancements are being made in terms of editorial credibility and investment into those positions within the company?
Part of the reason we've defied industry trends over the past year is that we've been intensely focusing on improving our editorial credibility. We've increasingly invested in experienced journalists, along with original and exclusive interview content. All of this takes investment, but it's been worthwhile, ensuring we still rank highly for editorial search results.
We've also invested in site redesigns. All our brands have undergone site redesigns over the past two years, with the design team working on improving user experience, easier-to-navigate sites, and increased page speeds, all of which are crucial to our SEO.
We’ve also upgraded our programmatic ad stack, ensuring ads are served as quickly as possible, which makes for quicker pages and better revenues. So despite there being some industry challenges, our focus on quality and speed has helped us buck the trend.
What have the individual titles done to bring those dividends?
We've got ten sites within the network, and it’s always a job making sure you give each site enough focus. It's almost an impossible job at the level we're growing organically, but we have paid particular attention to growing our rugby union and Formula 1 audiences.
"We have just launched our multi-sport live scores and content app, Sport365, which is going to be a big focus for us this year. Live scores is a hugely exciting area to compete in."
PlanetF1.com is now the biggest specialist motorsport website in the UK and third biggest in the world behind the official F1 site and motorsport.com. We’ve got eight full-time journalists dedicated to covering F1, and we were in the paddock for 14 of 22 races last season.
In 2025, our ambition is to have a presence at every race in order to build relationships with the teams and drivers and to create more original content through exclusive interviews.
We've also hired a USA editor, Elizabeth Blackstock, who’s based in Texas and has a substantial following on social media. Elizabeth also brings to us credibility beyond F1 with good relationships in Indy cars and Nascar. We're looking to expand beyond F1 with Elizabeth but also keen to build an American presence with F1’s growing popularity thanks to Netflix.
Planet Rugby is a similar story. Traditionally, we’ve been quite strong in the UK, but not so much elsewhere. We've made a big effort to expand the editorial team to cover the southern hemisphere much better, particularly South Africa and New Zealand, where rugby is the number one winter sport.
We had an interesting moment where we looked at Planet Rugby’s global traffic and saw that overall we were the number one site in the world, which is nice, but we weren’t the number one in any one single market. So we’ve taken a country-by-country approach to our growth strategy, which has been very satisfying.
What are you looking forward to in 2025?
Our aim in 2025 is to diversify our revenues into new revenue models like subscription and affiliate, and to diversify our audience reach through apps and social media platforms.
We have just launched our multi-sport live scores and content app, Sport365, which is going to be a focus for us this year.
With Golf365, we're creating the Golf365 Club, where you'll be able to subscribe for a season and get lots of exciting golf kit: gear, lessons, and discounts.
We’re exploring a podcast partnership with a major partner in that space.
On social media, we have many plans starting to roll out, particularly for our ‘Planet’ sites like Planet Football, focusing on football quizzes as well as content for F1 and rugby.
"Everyone gets that ads are a pain, but they’ve always been a reality of newspapers, TV, radio, and the digital industries for years, and it's because content isn't free."
Finally, why do I have to click on that annoying cookie box every time I visit a website?
The 'annoying' cookie box is something introduced by the EU for EU readers.
European readers will know that when they come to our sites, and pretty much any other site, they must either approve or disable cookies. Cookies are there to help us serve more relevant ads to our readers. If they don't approve those cookies, we can't serve relevant ads. Ultimately, it actually means we can't serve ads at all because the advertisers only want to serve relevant ads.
Cookies don’t give us anything that identifies the individual reader; it's anonymised data. But it is important for us as a publisher to have a general overview of our audience’s demographics so that we can work with those advertisers that are the best match for our audience.
What we are about to launch is a product called Consent or Subscribe, which a number of other publishers have recently introduced. It will offer our readers the option of paying a subscription for an ad-free service if they don’t want to accept cookies.
That way, both sides are winners. If you're happy to see ads, then approve the cookies. If you're not happy to see the ads, then you have the option to pay us. It won't be a large fee; we're thinking £10 a year, which we think is a very reasonable price to get ad-free access to our entire network of sites.
Everyone gets that ads are a pain, but they’ve always been a reality of newspapers, TV, radio, and the digital industries for years, and it's because quality content doesn’t come cheap.