As humans we are social beings. In fact, in some sports leagues, who have trouble filling the stands, they have moved to smaller, more quaint venues. Fenway Park is Fenway – packed and the place to be. The Old Olympic Stadium where the Montreal Expos played could fit 80,000 but they would only get a quarter of it filled. It felt like you were in someone’s living room, at a not-well-attended party.
It is not much different with a website, even in racing.
Case in point – The Paulick Report.
The Paulick Report engages its readers better than any racing site out there, considering its late start into the fray. At postrank.com, their labs page shows just how much engagement a website has and they have built a metric to describe it – an engagement score.
An engagement score is simply the number of mentions, links, forwards via social media, comments and other interactive measures a story or blog post has. Post Rank weights it based on importance, and voila, we have a score.
Here are three racing websites and their engagement scores for the past 30 days (click to enlarge).
As we can see, drf.com and equibase.com are information sites who fill their niche: The visitors are racing people, or fans who know about them. There is little engagement of their readers, and in turn, a great deal of their content is static content – published, and nothing else. Paulick on the other hand has a huge engagement score. His stories are responded to, and forwarded via news readers, social media and blogs.
Why is this important? Because when you have engagement you have people doing online public relations for you, and your sport. A link or headline from a Paulick story on Facebook or Digg is seen by non-racing fans. If a non-racing fan sees and clicks a link and comes to the report, chances are they see comments – there is someone home in our stadium. It’s good for us.
This does not, of course, mean that the drf or Equibase are doing nothing for racing. They do what they do best. However, with other sports like football and its NFL.com, world cup soccer, MLB.com for baseball and many others all engaging their fans and making it a priority, it is very important for us to have a site like the Paulick Report doing the same. (the Bloodhorse.com also does a good job with this, after their restr
ucturing).
This is especially important for us because we do not have a league office in racing. If we could turn back the clock I am sure (well, in racing maybe not) we would have a www.horseracing.com doing what MLB.com and NFL.com are doing. But we can not turn back the clock of course. In the meantime, Paulick is acting in large part like our league site, by filtering news and opinion to non-traditional racing demographics.














