"We want to be the publisher that every team and every brand wants to work with - and, of course, every fan wants to read."
As the engines begin to roar and the rubber starts to burn, we spoke to Planet Sport's Head of Publishing, Mark Holmes, about how PlanetF1.com has set its sights on taking pole position for Formula 1 content this season.
PlanetF1.com has enjoyed immense success over the last couple of seasons, particularly in UK and US markets. What have the PlanetF1.com team been doing differently compared to previous years?
PlanetF1.com has always enjoyed had a sizeable, loyal audience, but in a growing but competitive market we recognised we needed to invest in high-quality journalism to stand out.
We added a fine paddock journalist, Thomas Maher, to the team, got ourselves FIA accredited, and were present at seven of the races over the season, which is new territory for us. It’s helped us dramatically increase the volume of exclusive content we’ve been able to produce, including interviews with some huge names such as Christian Horner, Toto Wolff and George Russell.
In addition to this, we have really focused on maintaining helpful, evergreen content formats and constantly tried to innovate with new feature content with a particular focus on gaining a foothold in the US, something we’ve managed to do very successfully.
What does PlanetF1.com do differently to other F1 news outlets?
First and foremost, we do the basics very well. It’s not the sort of thing publishers tend to shout about, but our team have got an outstanding understanding of the right topics to write about and the killer lines from each story to get people reading our content.
And once a user comes onto our site, we like to think we provide everything they need: quality journalism, a good variety of content, lively and passionate comment sections and forum, good data, and an excellent live race offering.
You mentioned that PlanetF1.com is securing more and more high-quality exclusives. Tell me a bit about the team and what they're doing to achieve this.
It had been a long-held ambition of ours, but it was not until the final race of the 2022 season that we finally had a journalist in the paddock after gaining FIA accreditation. So building up relationships with teams has been difficult over the years. But we were regulars at European races in 2023 and have now developed several such relationships, leading to a number of high-profile exclusive stories and interviews over the course of the season.
The quality of our content means teams are now coming to us directly more and more, and our next ambition is to become a presence in North America and build even more of those relationships with the sport's key stakeholders.
We've also recently internally appointed an Audience Editor, Sam Cooper, who's going to be working with the Editor, Mark Scott, on new, innovative ways to engage an F1 audience around race weekends.
We've achieved a lot over the past couple of years, but we're certainly not done yet. We want to be the publisher that every team and every brand wants to work with - and, of course, every fan wants to read.
How does PlanetF1.com incorporate Planet Sport’s B2B proposition into its B2C content activation?
Our biggest strength on PlanetF1.com is our community. We've been doing this since 1997 and have fans who've been visiting us pretty much daily for 20 years or more. Our comments sections are by far the busiest of any of the sites in our network, and our best features like Driver Ratings and Race Conclusions regularly generate comments in the high hundreds.
So when we work with brands, we're not just giving them access to a huge audience of F1 fans, we're giving them access to a huge audience of fans who are genuinely engaged with and enjoy like what we do. We have a responsibility, therefore, to put that audience first and ensure we upheld our content for brands to the same high standards as we do everything else.
Storytelling has to come first - if we can't engage our audience with a topic, there's really no point taking the deal - and everything is produced by the same team who produce the rest of our content. Seeing our author's names on content provides a feeling of advocacy for the reader that's so important when promoting brads - and ensures we always maintain those high standards.