Converting Visitors to Viewers: Major League Soccer
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Mar 26, 2009 @ 04:37 PM
We were happy to announce this week our fourth season of powering QuickKicks for Major League Soccer. Completely redesigned, this year has all of our premium video navigation and discovery features as well as a remix capability.
A key question we ask all our customers is, “How can you best convert your visitors to viewers?” For many sites, the common tactics are just a list of clips in order of most recent to oldest and a search box. Major League Soccer is using Gotuit to better organize and present their content so that there are more interesting playlists and a more engaging viewing experience to covert those visitors.
For example, MLS chose to layout their video with the following top level choices:
- One Touch - this will show the star MLS players and all their best plays
- Amazing Plays - only the best of the best across all the games
- Games of the week - where each game gets its own playlist
- Archive - every game from past weeks
Within any game, the editorial choices are:
- Game Highlights
- Goals
- Saves
- Player Spotlight #1
- Player Spotlight #2
The result is that visitors are drawn to personalize their experience, by choosing the best plays, or just the goals, or just their favorite players.
For example, here is the first goal in franchise history for the Seattle Sounders FC:
Better content presentation results in increased traffic and longer session times.
MLS took it even further this year by enabling user-authored remixing. This deepens the engagement with the audience, by allowing them to create their own highlight reels and then share them with the community. The community can vote on their favorites here in the gallery. Here is one I liked called The Yellow Card March:
When a user creates their own remix, they are motivated to share the link and/or embed the video, as you can see on the March 24th post in the popular soccer blog (The Footy Blog) here.
All of this is accomplished using Gotuit metadata which acts as a lens into the original, unedited source game video. No video editing or clipping is ever done.
With rich, structured metadata, publishers can unleash the full value of their video libraries. For MLS, this means knowing the Team, Week, Player(s), Play Type(s) of each individual scene in their game video and leveraging that information into a better user experience.
Are you doing all you can to convert your visitors to viewers?