AFTV
AFTV is the largest football fan network in the world with 1.4 million YouTube subscribers and 2.5 million combined social media followers
Founded in 2012 as a YouTube channel, AFTV has become the platform for Arsenal fans to voice their views to the world immediately after a game. Arsenal fans from across the globe rely on AFTV for all the latest football news, match reviews, transfer updates, stats, opinion, insider gossip and banter. Fan interviews consistently amass millions of views across all platforms on a weekly basis.
AFTV is where the world watches, and the voice of the fan is heard!
The business engaged us to help redesign and build a new website to reflect the growing AFTV brand.
Next“Roughly one in every five Premier League fans consumes unofficial fan TV content.”^
The brief
AFTV is regarded as the most popular fan channel in the world. As the popularity of the channel has increased, AFTV’s challenge has been to create a seamless online experience that brings together all the elements of their diverse brand in one place to make it easy for fans and brands to connect with them.
Recognising that AFTV had ambitious growth plans, we approached them via Linkedin to offer our thoughts on how we could redevelop the website to reflect a brand that’s serious about football and to bring together the various elements of their business seamlessly. Head of Social Media, Harvey Moss, was impressed with our thoughts, and, after several meetings, he gave us his approval to redesign the website.
Next“AFTV has received more views on YouTube than Arsenal's official channel on the platform.”
The problem
Slow loading
Restrictive Content Management System (CMS) limiting who and how it is updated
Untapped opportunities to maximise AFTV’s social presence
Unengaging and outdated design
Disconnected content and missed sales opportunities
Repetitive tasks and too much time required to keep the site up to date
High bounce rates
Low user dwell time on the website
The solution
We took a deep dive into the structure of the existing site to understand how the main AFTV hub worked and connected to the other AFTV websites – merchandise sites, social media and progressive web-app.
We approached the User Experience (UX) from a fan and potential business partnership perspective and we set out an experience that would serve the right content to very different user needs in the minimum amount of clicks.
Here’s what we did:
Defined the site structure and user experience (UX) to create a centralised hub showcasing AFTV’s content across all channels
Created a better visitor experience to improve the ‘stickiness’ factor and a reason for single visitors to become repeat visitors
Developed a fully customisable CMS (WordPress) so the site can grow with the brand and designed it to reflect the commercial position of AFTV
Considered ways to improve the site to decrease bounce rates
Integrated (API call) with AFTV’s YouTube playlists to ensure the website delivers the latest YouTube video content
Promoted their different content formats by integrating ‘AudioBoom’ to showcase ‘podcasts’ within playlists which instantly updated on the website
Integration with ‘Opta Stats’ to showcase Arsenal FC recent results and upcoming fixtures
Elevated the exclusive paid-for content signup
Introduced newsletter signup functionality to nurture the mailing list data and to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV)
The result
Ricky Crump, Project Lead, Making Websites Better (MWB)
“As an Arsenal fan, who has followed AFTV since the beginning, this was a real passion project for me. AFTV has shown what the power of user generated/grass roots fan content can do. Love it or loathe it, the channel is successful with 1.2 billion YouTube views and millions of social followers. All of that success didn’t translate to the website. The website had grown over time and had different things bolted onto it. It was easy to see how we could strip the site back and focus on what was most important to users, sponsors and AFTV to create a cohesive, slick, seamless website and that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
Paul Warren, Managing Director, Making Websites Better (MWB)
“As an Arsenal fan and AFTV subscriber, the frustration I felt using the old website was real! It was slow, old-fashioned looking, disjointed and hard to navigate. I knew we could improve the user experience (UX) and make it more enjoyable to use, increase partnership and potential business opportunities. Delivering what people are looking for quicker was key – by reducing the number of clicks required to get to content and speeding the site up. The results are already speaking for themselves. From a purely selfish point of view, the site is a million times easier to use!”
Harvey Moss, Head of Social Media, AFTV