Planet Orange and MyColts.net are two official online communities from professional teams that often are praised by people (myself included) for being ahead of the curve and doing things the right way. But are they catching on with the average fan?
Here's an interesting picture taken from Compete.com:
According to Compete.com (probably not 100% accurate, but usually pretty close), both sites attracted roughly the same amount of unique visitors last month as they did in July of 2008. Here are the numbers:
- Planet Orange - 1,767 unique visitors in July (1,413 uniques in July 2008)
- MyColts.net - 8,290 unique visitors in July (8,137 uniques in July 2008)
Unique visitors is only one indicator of growth, and I didn't look at other important metrics such as number of active members, time spent on site, revenue generated from community members, etc. But according to Compete.com, the communities haven't grown much in terms of unique visitors over the past year. Why haven't these sites grown more?
I can't say for sure, but my guess is that it's a combination of things:
- Lack of promotion
- Lack of integration with existing marketing efforts
- No clear value proposition stated on the home page
- Not enough unique/exclusive content and access
- More focus on fans on existing social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc)
But those are just a few guesses. I really have no idea why these two communities appear to have stagnated in growth. I wonder if other team communities have also stagnated. What do you think?
Are official online team communities a good idea? I still say yes (when executed properly), but would love to hear your thoughts.