The New Online Reality at Fox Sports

Andrew Hossom, VP Marketing, FoxSportsInteractive

Fox Sports Interactive Listens to the Sports Fan with Web Analytics

It is easy to forget how recently broadcast and print media models controlled the way news and information were digested by the consumer. Entering the 1990s the three primary news media -- radio, television and newspapers -- operated comfortably on independent publishing cycles. "Hear it now, watch it tonight, read about it tomorrow," was the time-to-market motto of radio network juggernauts NBC, ABC and CBS, which dominated the "morning drive" and the first news of the day. Dinnertime was an opportunity to view what had been heard about earlier and breakfast was time to recap and forward older stories in the local newspaper.

These customs held until cable TV news began to upend traditional cycles, but it was the Internet that blew the old model out of the water. Broadcasters were blindsided by what would become ubiquitous access to news, minute by minute, 24 hours a day on a platform that offered free syndication for wire services, independent broadcasters -- and would eventually create secondary markets for bloggers. As Internet use exploded, the outcome became obvious: Over time, news of all types was becoming a low-value commodity, and broadcasters and publishers are struggling to this day in adapting to the new paradigm.

With this backdrop, it is difficult to understand why news media and businesses generally are only starting to differentiate themselves via the unique power of Web analytics. The Internet can provide instant feedback on consumption and traffic in ways no traditional broadcaster can measure, yet analytics have so far been exploited mostly to measure network and advertising traffic, and otherwise sell things.

This was initially the case at Fox Sports Interactive, the online arm of the Fox Sports Network. When Andrew Hossom arrived at his new job as VP of marketing at Fox Sports Interactive, analytics were primarily used to manage bandwidth and server capacity. Analytics still support engineering at Fox, but Hossom says the cultural shift has been to get the entire organization leveraging and analyzing consumer data in order to build better products and market more effectively. "Today I would say Web analytic applications are the foundation and lifeblood of our business and without them we couldn't run the business."

Verticalization and Micromanagement

The newer view of Internet activity at FoxSports begins where most companies end today, with measurements of total page views, total unique visitors and total visits. "The first thing we did was to shift the equation from total site traffic to vertical measurement and look at each sport as an independent business," Hossom says. "We took NFL, MLB, NBA and other businesses and then added 30 to 40 other data points to the three primary metrics." Another issue was the weekend cycle that dominates sports news versus the weekday cycle of political news. A small part of Fox's secret formula includes time spent per visit, movement of visitors between different sites, analysis of crossover between college sports sections and crossover between MLB and NFL when seasons start and end. These metrics are used on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and are far more comprehensive than the usual comScore and Media Metrix data.

Home Advantage: User behavior dictates the appearance of Web pages at Foxsports.com

A cross-functional reporting environment based on software from Web analytics specialist Visual Sciences is the centerpiece of information usage across functions that include sales, marketing, business development, editorial and operational functions. Editorial staff are the most constant users and manage breaking headlines and story placement on a minute-by-minute basis. "Editors will track and tweak a headline, make the caption a little more compelling and see if that has an effect on traffic," says Hossom. "It's a quick-moving environment so if a change has no effect, the story might just go away."

Special analysis cycles and metrics are built for non-recurring events such as the World Cup or Olympics. Such events can skew monthly visitor numbers, which is another reason Hossom likes to get off the old metrics. "It lets sales look at the 10 days leading up to the Super Bowl, the game and the day after. By analyzing the specific pages, the traffic and time spent sales can build projections and effectively package content to advertisers."

It's not to say managers are strictly dependent on analytics. "Editors are editors for a reason, they generally know what people want to read," Hossom says. "They use data to make better decisions but you have to push content out there in the first place to have it discovered." For all the hundreds of data points exposed by technology, little is automated and most decisions are human-influenced. Hossom likes to use scenario testing in the background of daily activities as a means improve decision support.

Mulitchannel Broadcasting

All of this happens because FoxSports.com does business in a highly competitive Internet environment where ESPN, Sports Illustrated and network properties such as CBSSportsline.com vie for attention. News and sports news especially is often driven as much by personalities as it is by timely reporting. "Everyone knows who [ESPN's] Peter Gammons is," Hossom says. "Our own columnists, Kevin Hench, Mark Kriegel and others have strong opinions and a lot of colorful style and we want to present those people in our own way. We don't necessarily use data to make those decisions." Still, a tactic pursued by FoxSports and competitors alike is to track the popularity of specific wire content versus targeted content created in-house, which in effect uses Web analytics to help senior editors make decisions about the staffing mix while they are testing products.