Time flies! It’s two years since we launched TheTicketingBusiness.com and TheStadiumBusiness.com news channels. From a standing start we’ve grown a global readership in our two key industry verticals.
We’ve published and promoted over 3,400 articles on each of the sites. Our twice-a-week e-newsletter digests now reach in excess of 16,500 named individuals in the stadium sector – and a whopping 31,600 colleagues in ticketing. And those readership figures are all post-GDPR cleansing!
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the content – especially the often unrecognised news team, busy ‘behind the scenes’ fishing our stories and making sure we curate the most important items for our readership.
EDITORIAL PROCESS
We’ve a fairly slick daily editorial process now in place: an early morning new sweep of 20-30 items across each channel; an editorial cut first thing in the morning; then the 5-8 items get posted each day before lunch; finally a twice-a-week selection of the key Headlines to feature in the newsletter (with the rest of the news running in the Also in the headlines section).
Xperiology continues to provide the newsletters free-of-charge. Fundamentally they are a great way for us to market our events, promote (and drive nominations to) the Awards programmes we run and also facilitate marketing services for our key sponsors and partners.
QUICKER. EASIER
This summer we invested in an overhaul of the coding and a refresh of the interface to help speed up the search and response times for our readers – especially the 60% who are now accessing their mobile. Nobody likes to wait around for the news do they!
And we’ve now included a few paid-for slots for advertisers. We’ll keep this to a minimum but (i) advertising helps keep the service free to view and (ii) there’s a lot of great innovation and stories from the industry suppliers out there that is deserving of coverage.
With such a broad geographic (but very narrow vertical) readership, we’ve also learnt a lot about the industry globally – its reading habits, the topics that really matter, the markets which are growing etc. We find this back into the editorial curation and try to keep ‘on the pulse’ despite the resource limitations of a (micro-)SME.
NEXT?
So what’s planned for the next two years? Although we will not going to a subscription model, we can envisage a membership portal where our readers can maintain their details and manage their complimentary subscription. This will help us get better insights into what our readers want to learn and the topics which are of most interest. It will also allow us provide more in-depth content and reporting – probably in the form of White Papers, research and statistics and expert interviews.
THANKS again to everyone who has helped us along the way. Here’s to the next 200 newsletters!!
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