Right now, there probably isn’t any company on the planet hotter than WhatsApp.
This week the mobile messaging app maker reached the outstanding milestone of 500 million monthly active users. The engagement levels within it have proven to be just as impressive: 700 million photos and 100 million videos each day. Such rapid growth and interactivity by its users led to Facebook acquiring them for $19 billion just a few months ago. They have clearly positioned themselves to be a leader in the global communications landscape.
Despite the latest accomplishments, WhatsApp awaits to see when European officials will completely approve the Facebook transaction. This time frame may end up falling in line with their yet-to-debut feature, free voice calls, sometime in the coming months. They remain adamant that the company will maintain its independence and tried to diffuse external speculation that believe otherwise.
WhatsApp’s surge to mainstream adoption certainly has caught the attention of developers and investors alike. Plenty will attempt to create their own disruptive technology within this highly competitive space, while looking to their success as a model to follow. Others, however, are starting to realize it’s best to find ways to implement WhatsApp to their own properties. The latter may be the best route to take for various industries, including sports.
“Our only thought about integrating WhatsApp into theScore was about providing our users with another great way to share our mobile-first sports content,” Jonathan Savage, Senior Vice President of Product, tells SportTechie about theScore’s initial reaction to WhatsApp being acquired.
theScore has built a platform that covers a sundry of sports news, which is quite granular by nature for users to digest on their respective mobile devices. One of the app’s key features to date is the “Feed” that can be personalized to a user’s liking. Savage mentions that they’re aware that the current available options to share content within the app don’t specifically allow for a large degree of privacy, sans e-mail. Sharing anything through social networks inherently makes it public and e-mail takes more time to do so. Accordingly, theScore became the first sports app to offer WhatsApp as a means to share for its users base.
Currently, theScore’s news staff produces close to 300 updates across the various sports in real-time. The app needed another avenue to expedite and personalize the way users could filter their respective news feed. The key benefit of WhatsApp relies on users’ flexibility to create group of friends that happen to have similar interests. Sometimes a user’s entire network doesn’t necessarily represent the best community to notify of a particular kind of story. WhatsApp presents controlled environment to have a conversation in.
“We want to ensure the user experience on theScore is as seamless and simple as possible; and that includes giving them the best options to share the content served-up to them,” says Savage.
From a technical standpoint, integrating WhatsApp to theScore was “relatively straightforward.” When WhatsApp made their API available to developers recently, it provided an easy opportunity to build this option on top of existing app properties. Savage acknowledges that this process was a lot more convenient than anything else they’ve had to do from scratch. Thus, WhatsApp falls in line with theScore’s ongoing focus towards a clean UI and UX.
One of the factors that made WhatsApp so appealing to Facebook, though, is their vast international presence. They are experiencing extensive scale from countries such as Mexico, India, and Brazil; the latter two sites with 48 and 45 million active users, respectively. These staggering numbers shed light on its worldwide scope. These regions’ communication habits within this ecosystem offer possibilities for engagement that differ from domestic mediums.
So, how does WhatsApp’s user base pertain to and enhance that of sports fans?
“It’s a digital extension of chatting with your buddies in the bar about the latest trade or injury,” explains Savage.
theScore believes in this water cooler assessment as it relates to WhatsApp and their own users. The demographics of both entities align quite well, in terms of youth and internationally. Since they already cover all the major soccer leagues abroad, Savage expects to see a significant engagement uptick once the World Cup commences soon. This event, in it by itself, should indicate the crossover potential. Having this option available in advance proves to be strategic ploy on their behalf.
Like any free app model, theScore’s monetization efforts rely on in-app advertising. WhatsApp, in turn, suffices as an avenue to “amplify” their content. The driver behind all of this is for their users to engage and consume their content at an increased level. Advertisers want their messaging to be seen where discourse and activity is happening, This integration serves that purpose.
“When making product decisions, we simply ask ourselves: ‘Will this improve the experience of sports fans using theScore?’”
This statement by Savage reflects theScore’s hopes that WhatsApp “empowers” their users to interact more going forward. Sports fans don’t have to exit their app to use WhatsApp externally any longer. theScore just might ride some of WhatsApp’s wave–popularity and users–to continued success among its own five million active users during the process as well.