Telegraph's 'Project Babb' to roll out after pulling in social media audience to new mobile site
The Telegraph is expanding a mobile website set up specifically for readers interested in the World Cup to cover general football following the success of ‘Project Babb’.
Experiment: Project Babb
The title came up with the idea for the mobile site after analysing data that showed it was interacting with a younger, football-interested audience on Facebook but failing to pull readers over to the Telegraph website.
“It’s unlike any editorial product we’ve done before,” Telegraph director of digital content Kate Day told The Drum. “We’ve never really started with looking at data about our audience and then building a product from the ground up, we usually have some idea of whether we want to create and app or a website and what it might look like, so Babb was very different in terms of its inception.”
The website is a stream of content around the World Cup designed to be shared, but Day added that it was not created as a news site and focus was instead on producing content readers would be interested in rather than fresh developments.
The Telegraph recruited staff through tweets appealing for writers who "live on the internet and love sport" for the site and Babb is produced by a team of four headed up by deputy digital sport editor Thom Gibbs.
The site launched on May 12 and hit one million unique users by 16 June. Following the success, the Telegraph now plans to roll it out to the wider football audience.
“We’re now going to see if we can transition it into becoming a site about football so that Babb is on after the World Cup,” she said.
“The challenge now is to maintain Babb’s heart as being a site for people who about the World Cup but to broaden it out to people who talk about football generally, the challenge is whether or not we can keep up the success of Babb.”
The site carries in-stream advertising and Day said it offered advertisers a different proposition from the Telegraph’s traditional sports demographic online.
“Sixty per cent of Babb readers are under 34,” she said. “We’ve had a million sessions driven by social and about 70 per cent of those come from Facebook. Sixty per cent of the traffic is mobile, and on its biggest weekend that went up to 70 per cent. When there are big spikes in social traffic, we see big spikes in mobile traffic, so the two very much go hand in hand.”
Day added that the success of Babb may not lead to similar spin-off mobile sites for other interests of Telegraph readers, but that the project, data gathered and learning curve of the process would be valuable for future strategy.