College football’s national signing day, set for Wednesday, is projected to generate some of the largest traffic and ad buys of the year for several prominent sports sites.
Rivals.com, now owned by Yahoo!, last year generated 75 million page views and an estimated 1.5 million unique visitors for national signing day, numbers that could be as much as doubled this year, according to internal projections.
ESPN.com, similarly, will make the event a lead story on its main page and generate a seven-figure count in unique visitors as a result. Others competing in the college recruiting space, including Fox’s Scout.com, HighSchoolSports.net and CSTV.com, are busily preparing for major traffic spikes, as well.
“This not too long ago was still very much a niche thing, but it’s absolutely exploded into this huge, celebratory day,” said Patrick Stiegman, ESPN.com vice president. “But the mainstream fan has really come to understand that recruiting is the lifeblood of any college program. Other than the occasional transfer, a school’s success and coaching careers everywhere are made and broken on signing day. So, as we’ve gone well beyond that niche audience, it’s become a huge content play for us.”
A big part of the rise in online interest stems from the nature of signing day itself. There are no exclusive rights to buy and exploit. Aside from scheduled commitment announcements and the occasional interview, there’s no live event video, either. Instead, the primary nature of the day is to track busily the massive rush of signings and analyze them as quickly as possible — a situation tailor-made for the Internet.
ESPN.com will simulcast a live seven-hour recruiting special from ESPNU and buttress that with an online recruiting tracker and analysis of more than 3,000 top high school players. Other sites, including Rivals.com and Scout.com, similarly will feature trackers, highlight videos, audio feeds, and rankings of top players and recruiting classes.
Rivals.com expects huge gains in traffic.
“It’s such a spectacle now,” said Shannon Terry, Rivals.com chief executive. “Athletes in many cases are prolonging their decisions and announcements for this, which just builds it up even more. And ESPN, in a lot of ways, is almost the best thing to happen to us in this regard. They’re making it such a huge mainstream event, and it ultimately helps shine a light on those of us who deal endemically in this space every day.”
Much of the recruiting content historically has resided behind a paid subscription wall. But as mainstream fan interest has grown, almost all of the content now has come to exist in a free, ad-supported model.
Among the companies making significant buys this year for signing day are Conoco Phillips 76, which is the presenting sponsor of the ESPNU show simulcast on ESPN.com; Nike, which is the presenting sponsor for Rivals.com’s recruiting channel; and Circuit City, which has attached itself to a signing day countdown clock on Rivals.com and also has bought inventory on Scout.com.
