9.5 MILLIONS Flywheel Model

MILLIONS is the world’s leading e-commerce-enabled media platform that connects the world of sports. Their custom-built platform offers a “one-stop shop” for its users, including sports fans, athletes, agencies, content creators and brands. How? MILLIONS is a perfect example of the flywheel business model. Let me explain.

MILLIONS is fully e-commerce and live shopping enabled. This means that a profile can list and sell a variety of products. You can design your custom merchandise line (with the help of MILLIONS in-house design team) with zero inventory risk through a print-on-demand model, list or auction memorabilia, offer personalized videos, or even list “experiences” which can range from a one-on-one virtual meet and greet, to an in-person training session, to a keynote speech!

MILLIONS is also live streaming enabled. This unlocks a content engine that fuels the fire for a profile’s productization and monetization and opens the door to brand opportunities. How? Athletes, podcasters, content creators and gyms can stream LIVE on MILLIONS (and even charge a Pay-Per-View if they like) or upload offline content to their Media feed, knowing that if it meets quality standards, it will enter MILLIONS Media Lab. MILLIONS have dedicated teams focused on streaming, content production, and digital strategy (including social media). Working collaboratively, these teams will create short-form content from the longer streams and distribute it through their vast network of social media properties. How does this aid monetization? The short-form content has CTA’s to a profile’s next stream, a newly dropped merchandise line, or an upcoming memorabilia auction.

And how does this open the door to brand opportunities? Athletes were the original influencers. Brands know the inherent value of having sports personalities market their products. With MILLIONS being LIVE Streaming enabled, having a dedicated media feed showcasing both long and short-form content, and an extensive network of social media properties, brands know that through partnering with MILLIONS, they will receive high-quality content delivered to an audience that identifies strongly with the talent.

So, how does the flywheel work? Here’s an example. An Athlete joins MILLIONS and creates Media (a WatchParty, podcast, etc). Their fans consume the stream and follow the Athlete on the platform. The fan is now notified of all future activity by this athlete on the platform. The fan purchases the athlete’s merchandise, and a brand offers sponsorship for the athlete to create more content and have MILLIONS distribute it to them. The fans, athletes and brands all have positive experiences through these processes. Through word of mouth and strategic email campaigns, more athletes join and create content. More fans are brought to the platform. More brands offer sponsorship. And so on and so on.

Content Marketing

While more and more apps and AI tools are being created to assist in this space, distributing authentic content on social media can be a very manual process. Leveraging existing networks is an important strategy that can aid reach, traffic and engagement for campaigns. In sports marketing, selective collaborator requests on social media posts can result in significant growth in impressions. This can be with targeted athletes or brands, as well as sports fan pages. Some fan pages have hundreds of thousands of loyal, engaged followers, and just one post can be leveraged to reach an incredibly large audience. Building relationships with these pages can also be mutually exclusive. You, as a marketer, want your content to reach more people, and they want more content for their page, especially if they don’t need to create it. It’s a win-win and a great way to scale your reach and following.

Website traffic is critical to the success of an e-commerce platform. Strategies that increase reach are important, but reach without conversion to new users is an unsustainable model. Sports fans are motivated to consume sports content that provides informative knowledge about their favourite teams and athletes. MILLIONS has seen the most success through providing its users with unique and timely content. Two examples are through LIVE interviews and capitalizing on moments. LIVE interviews provide fans with exclusive insight into an Athlete’s day-to-day life and a platform for them to engage with the Athlete and Host in real-time. These interviews can be clipped and distributed through the platform’s social network to bring fans back to the platform. Other clips that can be leveraged to bring people back to the platform are ones based on newsworthy moments that happen external to the business. For example, an athlete with a profile on the platform has a huge moment in a game. Clips can be made of this moment, with CTA’s back to their profile related to other forms of content or products. The fan’s attention is captured by the moment, and once engaged, you are more likely to induce follow-up action as opposed to sharing the same CTA at a different time. This also highlights the need for a focus on SEO. The more your platform can be visible when moments external to your initiatives occur, the more passive traffic you will receive. Ensuring your content indexes correctly and that you invest time in blogs and other strategic copywriting is worth its weight in gold.

“MILLIONS Flywheel Model” by Tyler Hosie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.