by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) When the ABC circulation and Amps readership figures come out, Soccer Laduma is often the star of the show – gaining ground or holding steady – but media watchers tend to dismiss it because it’s a sports title.
The weekly newspaper’s number are big – 315 000 circulation and 3.2-million readership (by comparison the Daily Sun’s circulation is 266 000 and it has 5.3-million readers) while its online stats put it among the top websites in the country. Effective Measure stats for April 2015 reported 1-million unique browsers and 27-million page impressions for mobile, and 239 349 uniques and 3.6-million page impressions for web.
In January this year – when the transfer window with player movements spells intense interest in football – Soccer Laduma did 55-million page impressions for web and mobile, CEO Peter du Toit recently told Grubstreet.
Du Toit – who started the paper in 1997 that is now partly owned by Media24 –says that his message to advertisers is that Soccer Laduma may live and breathe soccer but it’s more than that: a place where customers are in the best mood to listen to what they’ve got to say.
“The critical thing that we all need to understand is that everything is about relationships – whether it’s a relationship with your partner or with a customer – and it’s when you talk to the person that counts. If you want to talk to your child or your wife about something, you’ve got to pick the right moment.
“Brands need to be where their customers are but, in particular, where they are having a good time… People are generally in a happy, fun mood when they’re watching their favourite sport so it’s a good time for a brand to talk to them.
“Football happens to be the biggest sport in South Africa – and people love talking football and being engaged with it, which is why we have hundreds of thousands of engagements on our site never mind page impressions – because they like being in our environment.
“This is why mobile is big for us but also the newspaper. A guy goes into his cave when he read our newspaper.”
As a measure of engagement, the website gets more than 400 000 comments a month. When it comes to social media, Soccer Laduma has more than 232 000 Twitter followers and 905 000 Facebook likes.
It is a very profitable operation but covering a popular sport is not necessarily a blueprint for success. South African soccer publications have fallen by the wayside in the past decade such as Times Media’s SoccerLife, which was closed in 2011. So what sets Soccer Laduma apart?
Says Du Toit: “When I started this publication, I said to myself: ‘I’ve read so many football publications all over the world where I don’t get what I want so I’m only going to put in what the readers want’. And we did that simply by asking them. We created the biggest letters section I think I’ve ever seen – and it’s still one of the biggest.
“We read every single letter – we still do – and we literally asked them questions about what they wanted to read.”
What do the readers want?
“The most important thing is they don’t want to know my view; they want to know the player’s view. And that’s why we do lots of interviews because it’s the players and the coaches who are the stars. And who do the stars want to talk to? Not journalists but to the fans.
“We’ve almost taken the journalist out of the equation. We don’t have any high-profile star journalists. We try to create an environment where the reader feels he’s interviewing the player himself – so much so that we encourage readers to send us questions and we put their names on the questions so it’s so-and-so from Daveyton asking Doctor Khumalo this particular question.”
The key is to show respect for the reader, says Du Toit, and the players get this too as they’d rather talk to the fans than to a celebrity sports writer trying to demonstrate his knowledge of the game.
Is there room for more sales, readership and online growth? Du Toit thinks so – and in other directions. He says he has been blown away by the remarkable rise this year of the Soccer Laduma Supporters Club.
A year ago Soccer Laduma was approached for help in setting up a supporters’ club. It was officially launched in March 2015 and has a support team at Soccer Laduma while it’s managed by the members.
“We created the infrastructure with the Soccer Laduma Supporters Club, where in a very short period of time they formed a committee and that committee appointed 29 regional chairpersons, and they have created over 150 branches around the country.
“It grew so quickly that we then created the same thing online so that now we have something like 30 000 Soccer Laduma Supporters Club members.
“Because of their trust in us, they are basically using us to create a platform where they can have a bigger say on South African football. In doing so, we take their collective voice to the sports authorities such as Safa and the PSL.”
The club has one main aim: to help soccer supporters create a better soccer environment from a spectator’s point of view.
An interesting development is that members started putting their views forward on sponsors (for example, particular problems they might have with banking) so Soccer Laduma responded by doing on-the-ground and online surveys.
The sponsors are charged for this information and the money flows back to the club.
Another unexpected development are members requesting specific information, for example, about health issue such as diabetes and also asking for their clubs to become depots for e-commerce deliveries and couriers (because companies find it difficult to locate addresses in SA’s townships).
“It’s become a social support structure and it underlines that the soccer supporter is not just a fan of football,” Du Toit says. “He or she has interests as broad as anyone else.
“It’s been a wonderful growth for Soccer Laduma from a newspaper and a website about football that has morphed into the supporters’ club, which has morphed into business opportunities for the members and research opportunities for brands.”
At a time when many print titles are striving for newsroom convergence, Soccer Laduma is already operating as a determined digital-first operation.
Take, for example, the fact that the print title has three reporters (and a team that reworks copy) while the website has more than 40 staff members, including four people dedicated to analysing content performance using tools such as Chartbeat.
This information is fed back to the editors on a weekly basis, says Du Toit.
“Not a single story goes out that is not fully analysed the next day… The great thing is that you know what’s working… But it’s also a very involved exercise. You’ve got to be looking at those numbers continuously.
“We put a lot of stories out and we work from early in the morning up to 11 o’ clock at night. It shows you that unless you’re prepared to put time and effort into online – and do the analysis – you must get out the business.”
Thirty percent of users come to the site via social media so there is also a team managing social networks. This is a big cost, Du Toit says, but it’s worth it because it’s an important marketing arm.
“You’ve got to work very hard to make money out of digital,” he says. “Everybody thinks it’s low cost and easy to do. It’s not. It’s actually a labour of love.”
Du Toit says he believes more advertising revenue will flow to digital in the future but advertisers need a better understanding of the medium, which he believes is the job of digital publishers – and to show that it’s not just about page impressions but also engagement.
“There has to be a commitment from advertisers to understand the medium better but we have to lead the way.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet with Biznews. This piece was published first on Journalism.co.za, the website of Wits University’s journalism school.
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