FanHub: Making Sports across Digital Platforms More Engaging... and More Fun

The sports industry, although prevalent, is largely dependent on viewership; in simple words, fans are the heart and soul of all sports and games. From simple score updates to complex fantasy leagues, fans constantly seek the highest possible engagement with their choice of club or team. A group of such devoted fan’s, the founders of FanHub, identified the lack of fan engagement platforms in Australia contrasting the immersive experience they had enjoyed in the United States and the United Kingdom. Consequently, they established FanHub—a digital fan engagement company—with the prime motive of providing a deeper interaction between sports and fans alike. “At the start of a sporting season, millions of fans flood sports websites, seeking every opportunity available to connect with various sporting events around them,” explains Andrew Cronyn, Director of FanHub and one of those founders. “And to add value to that, we have one mission in mind—making sports on digital platforms more interactive and enjoyable for fans,” he adds.

England is home to one of the richest football fan bases in the world and English Premier League is undoubtedly the most prestigious competition in the country. Fans seek fantasy leagues, news updates, transfer news, and everything even remotely connected to their favorite club. Rightfully, Fantasy leagues provide fans with the most realistic form of engagement with clubs and players. When The Sun news publications in the UK sought to convert their Dream Team fantasy audience into a cloud-based product, they had the challenge of delivering a high-traffic application platform that could handle millions of complex transactions at the start of the Premier League season with zero loss of integrity in those transactions, a challenge which was ultimately bestowed upon FanHub. The last 72 hours before season kick-off sees a huge volume of users log in and carry out critical transactions to finalise their teams. During this critical period, the security of users' credentials is deemed the highest priority. The company utilized its cross-development suite of resources to administer the overall functioning of the Sun’s Dream Team products, facilitating numerous transactions such as user registration and payments, player trades, team-news, and transfers updates. This has a complexity similar to that required of a bank application or government taxation website. Some sports fans would argue this is even more important, such is the ferocity with which users compete against their friends, colleagues, and strangers.

FanHub successfully unified mobile and web interfaces to target a larger audience while delivering state-of-the-art traffic management and user functionality - and most importantly no downtime or integrity issues.

With its roots in Fantasy, FanHub has diversified and offers a wide range of products, such as match predictors, trivia games, and polling services, in their engagement platform, allowing fans to continue the conversation with like-minded people. These work in synchrony with each other to provide a deeper, more seamless experience for fans spanning across various sporting events. With support for extensions and widgets in all of the FanHub products, clients can customize the experience to suit their requirements and interact with their fan base more effectively. Being one among the first in the Australian market to implement an API driven platform, FanHub fosters collaborations and partnerships with various media groups & rights holders to implement value-added applications that go hand-in-hand with their clients’ broader suite of products.

FanHub is acutely aware that mobile platforms hold the majority of viewership in the sports industry and emphasize that the company strives to assist their partners with the move of their audience to mobile. Leveraging their passion and expertise in the sports industry, FanHub provides custom design and user experience solutions by understanding user behavior for both mobile and web-based applications, with an increasing focus on how social and new chat and messenger platforms need to be considered as part of the end user's experience.

Australia-based FanHub has expanded their reach to the European and American markets with the recent establishment of offices in London and New York. The company firmly believes in the mobile-first approach to enable immersive discussions and interactions among various demographic fan bases around the world. Utilizing the data analytics obtained from social media marketing and advertising campaigns, FanHub and their clients analyze users’ behavior and tailor their software experience to deliver the right product to the right people, at the right time. “Our goal is to make the overall fan experience enjoyable because ultimately, that is what sports and games are all about,” concludes Cronyn.