The NFL has a long tail.
This tail is made up of the 70% of fans who are not considered “avid”.
Let’s call them “social” fans.
Social fans are not, by and large, heavy users of NFL web sites, but they are absolutely interested in the experience created by the NFL. They like to be where the action is and the NFL is where the action is - in most U.S. cities, from August through January.
In my opinion, the Internet in general (and social networks specifically) give us many new ways to engage the long tail as never before. When we do, we will see our share of attention from our entire fan base (avids and socials) increase dramatically.
Read this article for a quick illustration of the long tail and how it is impacted by social networks, or rather, the other way around.
Myspace, for example, is one of the most popular sites on the Web, yet its traffic is made up a millions of tiny websites, personal pages actually, and its page views come from users clicking back and forth between their own pages and their friends’ pages. Not one of these personal pages is a mainstream “hit”, but when aggregated at one domain (myspace.com) the site becomes part of the “head”, which makes it worth at least $580 million (according to News Corp, since that’s what Rupert Murdoch paid for it).
Hindsite is 20-20. It’s much easier to hang a value on Myspace now that someone had the guts to shell out real dollars for it. It’s even easier since Murdoch hasn’t been crucified in the press for spending the money. On the contrary, the Myspace purchase has begun to look like a bargain ever since Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion.
I’m not saying theses guys are right BECAUSE they spent money, but I doubt if they would have spent money in the first place if they didn’t see some huge potential. The beautiful thing for the NFL is that we don’t have to buy anything to get into this game. Rather, once we build it we could probably sell the rights (if we chose to) for a significant sum. We already have significant traffic across our network. We have ample media exposure with which to promote our own social networking platform. And when it comes down to it, the technology required to build the platform is relatively inexpensive.
But these are only my opnions. I’m merely a voice in the wilderness, a flea on the long tail. Yesterday I had 67 people visit this blog, which is an all time high! (Thank you very much). Am I the only one who sees things this way? Am I crazy? If not, how can I help inspire real movement in this new direction?
