Indian Sportstech Investor names Sportstalksocial in his Strategies
It was a big day for me. I got to interview one of the most reputed sports-tech investor of India. There is a good news for we all at the community at #sportstalksocial. @cryptoandcoffee your efforts of promoting #sportstalk with #ocd project have started yielding results. Investors have started calculating the return on investments.
The venture capitalists and funds are now considering the sports-talk platform as one of the option of monetization in their portfolio companies. They are figuring out how best they can scale up the companies monetizing on blockchain products like sports-talk.
Here are some of the excerpts from my interview.
Background of Meeting
Nazara Technologies is all set to list its shares on the stock markets. Nazara is the first Indian sports company coming out with an IPO. It has 1,021 android games, which primarily target mass-mobile internet users in emerging markets. Monetization is through periodic, daily, weekly or monthly subscriptions through carrier billing, depending on arrangements with telecom operators.
On the backdrop of IPO we had the opportunity to interview the Indian Sports-tech investor Mayur Joshi, a well known and renowned Chartered Accountant focused on Sports tech investments. He is quite bullish on the Nazara technologies. Our team asked him some important questions and following is the extract of the discussions on sports-tech.
So what did IPO mean for SportsTech?
A lot actually. IPO of Nazara indicates the entry of sports-tech in Stock markets. Nazara's acquisition of Sports-keeda was one of the important milestones. Sportskeeda was the content platform which was valued at the enterprise value of Rs.66 crores. This IPO will open the doors of opportunities for the sportstech companies to raise the capital on the stock markets.
How have been the investments in Sports-tech Sector ?
2020 has been a truly fascinating year for the Sports-Tech, especially given that most of it was without any live sports. January started strong with over $550 Millions invested in the month but the year came to a crawl as the next seven months brought in less than $1b. All that changed in September with investments crossing the $1 Billion mark in one single month followed by October contributing another $500m, primarily driven by the Fitness-tech and Football-tech space.
Fitbit, Cure.fit are some of the innovative examples of the fitness tech solutions.
The industry gained importance with sports teams and leagues looking for new ways to connect with fans. But the wave of investment that followed the pandemic was certainly unexpected.
Which sub-sector of Sports-tech is promising for you ?
Sports-tech is a large sector. It consists of different sports from Football to Cricket. Some of the most promising sub-sectors include the Venue Booking, Content Generation, Fans Engagement, Club Management, Tutorials & Trainings and leads generation. There are different apps from gaming to gambling. E-sports, Fantasy sports are also the upcoming sectors in the sports-technology. But most investment in the last couple of years has gone into the content creation platforms. The companies which engage their fans, reward fans for their activities are getting the bigger chunk of investments. Zwift, Dream11, Cure.fit, Mobile Premier League are some of the Indian companies that are attracting the investors worldwide.
What is the role of the Blockchain in Sports-tech ?
As we see that content and engagement becomes crucial aspects of the investments in Sports-tech, blockchain based applications would be important to track. Mayur Joshi further explains that he is working with the small companies which integrate their content platforms with blockchain.
Currently, his team is assessing the proposals which use the innovative monetization methods and think beyond google adsense. He sites an example of a company which uses #hive blockchain as the method of monetization. They generate the sports content which gets integrated with the hive based platform called #Sportstalksocial. This platform is the community of users and readers. They vote the content based on its quality and the content gets monetized. So every post has certain value in the tokens. These tokens can be sold on the exchanges for bitcoin or other crypto currencies. There are other blockchain companies such as Socios, Chilliz which are far more promising as they operate in the football-tech space and engage the fans based on the different activities.
What does it mean for STS Platform ?
Though this was not the part of the interview, I personally believe that sports-talk would gain a lot of attention of the investors in the coming future as they crystalize their strategies to monetize the content. They might buy big stakes for their portfolio companies or the portfolio companies can buy the huge amounts of tokens to reward their content. In any case the demand for the sports tokens is likely to grow up. We need to work out on the strategy to gain popularity of Sportstalk as the SEO tool in the digital marketing community. Hope @patrickulrich agrees to this.
I must admit that if investors are considering the platforms like sportstalk have a bright future. Attracting the venture capitalists like Mayur Joshi can help to generate the demand for tokens. Whether to make their portfolio companies grow or to create the sports content monetization strategy, in any case the tokens would have really bright future. We as a community seriously need to go out and scout for innovative investors like Mayur Joshi to come forward and consider sportstalk as strategy.
When investors with deep pockets and long term vision about the sector starts investing, they would be supported by the bright ideas and strategies to monetize, with best of the brains in the technology, sports and finance I am sure that there would be a lot more excitement in the community. Currently we are missing the real heroes on this platform.
Socios or Chilliz are able to create the excitement due to the engagements they are able to create through the football clubs.
For sportstalk to become successful, i guess @patrickulrich or other leaders like @cryptoandcoffee will have to go outside the platform and represent the community as the leaders. When some noise is done in the mainstream sports community then there would be a real excitement.
You have a point. In the sports-tech sector, sports-talk should be distinguished and should be known outside of the audience at the hive blockchain. Though there are different apps and many community members who are considered rich in various categories, the world outside of hive is far more bigger. I don't think we are even measured in percentage yet. Hence the community leaders should get out of the hive and should get active on twitter. I have recently started a twitter challenge, however there is very little response to the same.
Its brilliant piece of information. I was not much aware of this term sports-tech before reading this. Very well written and articulated point of view by the investor. Of course they have to be studied before making their investment decisions, but beautiful explanation of what is covered under sportstech
This is an interesting piece. ill be glad to support moves to push further this engagement. Reply to this comment and earn my share of support for the efforts so far.
This was couple of months back, I posted the update. But after that I have preferred not to be on this platform.