Winning by Sharing

Football seeks new revenue streams

With David Beckham announcing his departure from Real Madrid to join LA Galaxy with a promise to take football to new heights, and Tottenham Hotspur's hiring of Keith Mills who brought the 2012 Olympics to London, the expansion of the fan bases of top Premiership Clubs is set to go global. 

After talking to several London digital agencies, several brands and a couple of newspapers, The Comedy Hub was unable to convince anyone to take its concept any further.

Concept – The Comedy Hub & Pod The Premiership

• Create a platform that enables the user generation of sketches, fan songs, and football related humour
• Platform functionality designed to create any number of other comedy themes (future).
• Users submit in text and/or audio format
• A blend of studio and live audience recordings are professionally acted, directed and produced as RSS compliant podcasts
• The platform enables rating of content.  This increases the probability of consumption and file sharing behaviours – the wisdom of crowds.
• Platform editors select most popular/relevant submissions to professional produce official weekly Podcasts (2 per week)
• Brand/sponsor advertising inserts are placed at start/end of each Podcast

User Acquisition

• A media partner leverages its audience (readers or viewers) to participate in The Comedy Hub’s Pod The Premiership initiative through competitions and other promotional activities
• Media partner receives rights to distribute free content through all its media channels
• Media partner attracts new audience demographic worldwide

Distribution

• iTunes
• Media partner(s)
• Web - partners, reciprocal linking, RSS
• Mobile networks
• Fan sites & premiership club

Business Model

• Assume potential worldwide fan base of 100m-150m people, and growing
• One or more brands pay for platform development and operation in return for ad placement within Podcasts
• Two 5-7 minute Podcast shows are distributed every week over the 9 month Premiership season
• The Comedy Hub can likely achieve 10% penetration or 10m Podcast listeners by the end of the premiership season.  This translates into 20m opportunities per week to transmit brand’s message/ad

From a standing start in early May, zero spend on marketing, and near-zero on production. The Comedy Hub World Cup Podcast has;

• Produced 12 episodes - around 1.5 hours of audio – intra world cup
• Reached number 1 on ITunes under "world cup comedy" - ahead of Adidas, The Mirror, The Times (Not Baddiel & Skinner) and Telegraph. 
• It featured in the first 4 podcasts under "world cup" along side The Beautiful Game, Baddiel & Skinner, Sky Sports 
• In week 4 we broke through the 100 barrier and we are now listed at number 85 across ALL iTunes podcasts

I wonder what LA Galaxy would do with this concept given that it would only take a fraction of their spend on Beckham to make this reality?

World Cup Podcast Tops iTunes

It's day 20 of the World Cup and England is thorugh to the quarter finals and face Portugal. So far,
The Comedy Hub has;

• Broken the 100 barrier on iTunes, number 98 in ALL categories.
• In iTunes, using search criterion "world cup comedy" we are number one in popularity & relevance
• In iTunes, using search criterion "world cup" we feature in the top four with Baddiel & Skinner, Sky Sports & The Beautiful Game
• Itunes files downloaded from our web site represent almost 90% of all downloads.
• Over 70% of our site traffic is direct and most of our referrals are coming from email domains (Hotmail, Gmail, etc).  This suggests highly viral behaviour.  We've only had one complaint about ad inserts in the podcasts.

Has The Comedy Hub found a proven formula for reaching the iPod generation - a target rich audience of connected influencers?  For a fraction of the cost and zero marketing, The Comedy Hub  is just behind the multi-million pound Baddiel & Skinner production.

World Cup Podcast

Day 2 of the football world cup and The Comedy Hub world cup podcast has reached No.4 in popularity under a search for World Cup in the podcasts section of iTunes

The Comedy Hub is also ranked number 31 in the UK comedy podcast chart on iTunes

Can we eclipse Baddiel & Skinner or Ricky Gervais?  Possibly. The Comedy Hub podcast is the only world cup comedy show available via mobile phone.  It's going to be an interesting summer!

The Comedy Hub London Recording

 The Wise Buddah is a small recording studio in London's west end.  This is where The Comedy Hub will record its podcasts during the 2006 football world cup. 

The session today was a huge success and the three actors doing Wrighty, Motty and Gary Neville were on great form.  Some superb comedy was produced today scripted by Nick Hildred & Rikard Bell.

Let's hope the Bhuddha continues to smile on The Comedy Hub's creative talent and of course, on England's fortunes in the world cup.

Pod the world cup

Another Comedy Hub promotional show slides out of the studio bound for review by one of the world's first podcast editors of a national newspaper.

This sketch sees the cameras following Ian Wright's private reaction to an England game.

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What is The Comedy Hub?

This summer the Winning by Sharing team are experimenting with podcasting. We've joined up with some writers and actors to produce free twice weekly comedy shows around the football World Cup 2006 as audio podcasts. 

Ever wondered what Sven really says to his England players at half time? How Posh gets her musical inspiration? What Lineker and Hanson get up to off camera? Or whether there's anything Wayne Rooney won't bet on?  This summer you'll be able to find out all that and more as The Comedy Hub presents "Pod The World Cup" - an impressions based comedy Podcast following the fortunes of the England team as they try to win in Germany.

The two to five minute pod cast shows are studio recorded by a professional team.  The writers, Nick Hildred and Rikard Bell  have written for Johnny Vaughan, Frank Skinner, Graham Norton, The Big Breakfast, and Bremner, Bird and Fortune, and the actors have performed in Dead Ringers, Phoenix Nights, Bromwell High and BBC 2’s ‘Double Take’.

Nick and Rick have also written and produced the twice weekly satirical Podcast Whack My Bush. This is an impressions based comedy which takes the rise out of the escapades of George Bush, Tony Blair and their administration cronies.  These ninety shows, spanning 10 hours have  achieved a total of 600,000 downloads and are currently the 4th most downloaded independent comedy Podcasts on iTunes UK.

Uniquely, The Comedy Hub will bring together a combination of technologies to distribute free comedy content over the web, the mobile network and through online communities and blogs.  Content will be made available from The Comedy Hub web site, as mp3, an RSS feed within iTunes, and via mobile phones. 

I'll be recording the venture here as it unfolds.