Racing Victoria is spending $15m on a digital content hub hiring marketers, digital specialists and journalists as it bids to take racing coverage in house. Next it will bring together a publishing business, a production company, a radio business and wrap in a statistics unit to form an end-to-end venture.
The move could take millions a year out of newspaper racing sections alone, but chief commercial & strategy officer, Andrew Catterall reckons it's a "complimentary strategy rather than a combative one".
"A rising tide floats all boats,” he told AdNews. “If we can expand the audience for racing we hope it helps our media partners. We would love to see more racing coverage from News and Fairfax."
The aim is to put the focus back on the sport rather than the betting, said Catterall, but he accepted that media owners might not be over the moon about a new media company, funded by the sport, aiming to cover and monetise significant aspects of the business.
The business case is based on a five year agreement with the clubs to fund it, Catterall added, and the clubs and Racing Victoria were going to rebuild their websites anyway. "This means we can aggregate that at scale and do a better job."
While Catterall plays down the threat to publishers, the new venture, which will leave Racing Victoria as purely a regulatory body, will put a big dent in the coffers of media owners.
In a media pack circulating amongst media agencies, Racing.com touts 1.6m monthly users across the site, of which some 340,000 will come from mobile devices. It is seeking five foundation partners with $300,000 to spend.
In newspapers alone, bookmakers spend in the region of $10m per annum. Prices are higher than other sports because of the highly regulated environment and because of the competition for space from betting companies.
Racing.com will certainly aim to commercialise the venture, Catterall said, but "the extra revenue will be reinvested into further development." All of it? "Some of it."
To deliver, the business is staffing up. Dale Stratford,former CMO, Village Roadshow Theme Parks, come in as general manager, marketing and Andrew Burke, former CEO, Next Digital, is general manager, Joint Digital.
So far the media team - steered editorially by former Sportal managing editor Bren O'Brien - has around 20 staff, including journalists, back-end production staff and developers. Catterall said more staff will be added, and the unit planned to invest in more producers, developers plus social media and video capacity "but only if we can do it in an efficient way".
The operation will produce video and radio content as well as written media across channels. That could lead to Racing.com pitching for business against agencies, as has AFL's media unit. Catterall said that producing advertiser content was "not in the first phase of what we're doing. But if partners want that of course we will."
The racing body and the clubs already have their own production company, equity in a statistics business and a radio venture alongside the digital portal. Over the next couple of years the plan is to integrate the units (with statistics firm Risa in partnership) as well as the print assets "so we will have a business that goes end to end," said Catterall.
Layering the data into the business could prove interesting.
"Racing creates an incredible amount of data and only a limited amount of that is distributed by Sky and TVN. We have invested heavily in our tech stack to try and bring it all together and distribute it digitally," said Catterall. "But it is a multiyear journey."
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