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A recent survey from PwC highlights the two top revenue opportunities in sports. Improved fan engagement was cited by 85% of respondents, while 82% of participants saw enhanced media offerings, such as a digital direct-to-consumer service, as a top opportunity.

Monetization via digital subscription services is a key growth opportunity for participants in the sports industry, no matter whether you are a team, league, or aggregator of content.

FC Barcelona, the world's richest soccer club, announced this month the launch of its own digital platform and subscription service. The intention is to build a direct relationship with fans and equip the club with a better understanding of its fan base and, in particular, user behavior. FC Barcelona has selected Vindicia to support the subscription service for its OTT platform, Barca TV+.

Robust identity: Managing user relationships

No longer is it enough to contemplate a single user interacting with your digital subscription service. Instead, digital services need to support groups of users interacting in the context of each other. Internet-age identity must seamlessly support concepts such as group, role, invitation, revocation, and delegation. Take the well-regarded Netflix example. Netflix has designed a great experience where it understands the different users in the household, along with each user’s unique behaviors and preferences.

Providing a personalized user experience across the sports experience, while capturing historical user data for future monetization of content and services, can be the ticket a successful platform needs to succeed in capturing the loyalty from its fans.

Managing the subscription lifecycle

No matter what form your subscription offering takes, you’ll need to manage the subscription lifecycle in a way that delivers great experiences to fans. What else can stand in the way? Payment methods, retention, and entitlements are just a few of the challenges. If you want to maximize subscription revenue, you’ll also need to be able to find ways to cross-sell and upsell to subscribers.

Just as crucially, you can gain insight into your fans through their subscriptions. What content promotion worked best? What are the demographics of your subscribers, and individual users? Where are they located? With this information, you can use individual fan insights to more easily make advertising and product purchase part of your subscription model. In fact, intelligence into your granular subscriber base can become your secret weapon in the battle for attention and wallet share.

If you’re interested in making the most of subscriptions, you need the right teammates. Vindicia supports more than 100 companies that sell digital subscription services, including many of the world’s top sports industry players and subscription innovators. Contact us to learn how we can simplify subscriptions for your business so you can focus on creating the ultimate experience for every fan. For a deeper look at the changing sports landscape, read our white paper “Accelerate Growth of the Sports Field with Digital Subscription Success.”