At three-years old, The Players’ Tribune, owned by Derek Jeter, continues to make waves, announcing its expansion into Europe in recent weeks, as company officials look to lock in deals with networks, online streaming services and other content distributors. With offices in Barcelona and London opening this month, the company has now raised $58 million in funding, according to Reuters, and launched branded content last year. Overall, more than 1,800 athletes have contributed to the platform through long and short form stories, video series and audio. Cynopsis spoke with Jeff Levick, CEO of The Players’ Tribune, about the company’s recent deals, its three-year run, and what we can expect moving forward.
Levick on audiences: For one, we know our audience is incredibly diverse. Our audience is over 30% female, which is high for a sports outlet – and that is largely because we go beyond stats and scores. Our stories have a strong human interest component that transcends sport. Our audience is also educated, affluent and highly millennial audience, with nearly half our users aged 18-34.
We’ve also learned how hungry fans of underserved sports and markets are. For example, we’ve tapped into a passionate audience with our hockey content. It’s one of our best performing sports and two of our five highest performing pieces of all time are from hockey contributors that aren’t huge household names in sports.
On content strategy: We aim to tell powerful and authentic stories by athletes in as many formats and on as many platforms as possible, all over the world. It’s as simple and complicated as that. We are in a media age where premium storytelling doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all model, and publishers must have strong capabilities and experiences across multiple content formats. We have a carefully crafted programming strategy and a distribution model to drive our engaged audience and best serve our brand partners, while utilizing data to help inform these content decisions.
On engagement: With an average time of more than 8 mins on page, our audience is deeply engaged by our content. While stories about retirement or free-agent decisions break news and get a lot of media attention, fans are also engaging with moving personal narratives that focus on topics and issues away from the playing field – personal issues like mental health and transition as well as important social issues. Sports is just a prism for us to tell human stories.
On going global: We heard from athletes all over the world that there is a need for a trusted sports platform, not just in the US, but around the world. We saw great success with some of our stories from global contributors like Dani Alves and Cristiano Ronaldo, so we knew we were reaching new markets and there was a healthy appetite for this content among fans. It was clear through conversations with our global athlete launch partners over the past year that the relationship between the media and athletes in EMEA is just as fractured as it is in the U.S. and the opportunity exists to bring the athletes closer to their fans by providing them a platform to share their perspectives and authentic voices, in their own words.
This expansion is something we’ve been working towards over the past year. With the world’s largest sporting event, WC18, happening this summer in Russia, it was a good goal to work towards. We’ve been building the platform and team to make sure we can execute at the same high-level as we have demonstrated in the U.S.
