August 14, 2013
USA Today Sports’ For The Win on mobile
One hundred days after launch, USA Today Sports’ site For The Win has seen mobile eclipse desktop traffic.
USA Today Sports launched For The Win in April as a domain that exclusively specializes in social news. Given the overlap of social media usage that occurs on mobile, it really is no surprise that the corporate sees upwards of fifty percent of traffic coming just from smartphones.
“The entire site was built with the storytelling itself around two ideas: social distribution and how that folks find, discover and share content and mobile consumption because the way that folk are becoming news and following sports,” said Jamie Mottram, vp of content development at USA Today Sports, Washington.
Designing for mobile
Five to ten editors and writers produce daily content with visuals and multimedia playing a key role.
For example, a up to date story about PGA Championship winner Jason Dufner uses GIFs to indicate readers the athlete hugging his wife after the win. The post also included an embedded video.
All of the content works cross-platform, however the focus is obviously on mobile when consumers only have a couple of minutes to quickly make amends for the scoop.
An image-heavy story on For The Win
According to comScore, For The Win is the single sports site in the company’s top 25 sites with mobile bringing in additional traffic than desktop.
Smartphones rake in about half the site’s traffic with one more 20-25 percent coming from tablets. The remainder 25-30 percent of traffic comes from desktops.
Although tablets do usher in roughly an identical quantity of traffic as desktop, Mr. Mottram said that the location is logically more thinking about smartphones as a result of higher amounts of traffic that the devices usher in.
Thirty to 40 percent of all traffic, or 60-80 percent of mobile traffic, comes from iOS devices, with the remainder mobile traffic coming from Android devices.
The site has also undergone with regards to 50 product improvements since launching.
Mobile content appears in a feed
Growing audience
In the primary full month of launch in May, For The Win brought in 4.9 million unique visitors. This number grew 15 percent month-over-month in June.
Unique visitors in July grew 40 percent month-over-month, and For The Win now brings in an audience of 8.1 million unique visitors.
The majority of readers come to the location because of seeing a narrative elsewhere on a social media portal.
Dial’s Right Guard have been sponsoring the positioning since its launch. The emblem was meant to function the initial launch partner for 2 months but has extended its partnership with For The Win.
In addition to display ads, there’s also a piece on the top of the screen that marks content as sponsored by Right Guard. A click-through at the ads from either a desktop or mobile device ends up in Right Guard’s Facebook page.
For The Win doesn’t have any immediate plans to check out native advertising but acknowledges that may be a monetization method it could consider someday.
“The biggest takeaway from the 1st 100 days was how high the mobile consumption rates were,” Mr. Mottram said.
“We knew that we were building the positioning in order that it might be a very good experience on phones, but if it came back that fifty percent of usage was on phones, that was astounding to us,” he said.
“The next step is ready the way to take the mobile experience from good to great.”
Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York