Are six boats enough to make a race interesting for the world’s media and offshore racing fanbase?
Yes.
According to an 8 page report looking at the media numbers for the start of the Volvo Ocean Race – news coverage and social media have helped the race to show huge interest from around the world.
The report is not the ‘official’ media valuation, but instead a combination of statistics from private and public sources. The publication of the report to media and the wider sports marketing & media industry shows a marked difference in culture between the commercially backed race and the ‘angel funded’ America’s Cup.
Despite the transparency of the media information and the underlying strength of the coverage, the press release led with the biggest number they could find. The “cumulative audience” of online media for the start of the race was more than four billion. This number is described in the report as the “potential audience” – or in other words – if all 4,769 online articles published on 1,154 different websites were read by every reader…
As a number it is pretty useless, however, as a comparison to the 2008-09 race, it shows that the number of internet sources has doubled.
The entry of Team Sanya in this edition of the race has helped to drive the top-line television numbers higher, by capturing a slice of the Chinese television market. The report says that in China alone, a cumulative audience of 146 million followed the In-Port Race, Leg 1 start and the first few days of the leg via news broadcasts.
Underlying the TV numbers are perhaps less hyperbolic, but nevertheless impressive statistics that show 28 international broadcasters were on site and 517 clips to 86 media outlets downloaded from the Broadcast Room.
Perhaps as a challenge to other sailing properties, the Volvo Ocean Race has laid bare its Google Analytics data for the website which shows that around 283,000 unique visitors from more than 200 countries visited the official website during the Alicante stopover. Online fans are coming back and staying on the site for long periods of time resulting in more than 1.6 million visits to the site in the second week of November.
The Volvo Ocean Race has also succeeded in capturing the attention of the large French sailing fanbase. France is the single biggest source of visitors to the website, followed by Spain and the USA.
In the last edition, Facebook and Twitter statistics were not available, but both social media platforms are proving popular as methods of engaging with the race.
The Race has also seen massive growth on iPhone and iPad apps as fans on the move keep track with the latest news. The official app was launched in late October but has already reached 55,802 downloads, while the Android App equivalent has had around 7,500 downloads.
All this has been achieved through communicating the product in a better way rather than changing the product to try and make it easier to consume. There is smart technology behind it – the same technology that sits inside Predator drones built for the US Department of Defense, but the focus is not on the technology – the focus is on the sailors and the stories.
For the geeks, there are discussions about interpretations of design rules and navigational strategies. For the crash-and-burn crowd there have been dis-mastings, collisions and injuries. Perhaps the Volvo Ocean Race has benefited from major incidents throughout the first leg to keep people tuning in, and it will be interesting to see how the figures hold up during the duration of this edition, but these numbers show that there is an audience for this kind of sailing.
