amateurgolf.com - Video a Big Part of 2007 Success
We are amateurgolf.com, the only website that has concentrated solely on the amateur game
amateurgolf.com was founded in 2000, and we survived that year’s dotcom boom (and bust) by never losing touch with our core audience -- the 99.7% of golfers who aren’t pros.
We focus on the competitive amateur game, building traffic to our site by providing the most comprehensive database of tournaments on the web. This attracts tournament players, friends and family, and coaches. And we’re not just talking about junior or college players – the mid-am and senior categories are the fastest growing areas of our site.
There’s no question about it, many of our customers have serious game. Jamie Lovemark found and joined the site just over a year ago, and we watched him have one of the most amazing freshman seasons in recent history. But alongside Lovemark are many single digit and low teens handicap players who may need strokes to play him, but who could easily match his energy and enthusiasm for the game.
If there is a competitive edge out there, these players seek it out with a passion.
Much of amateurgolf.com’s content is free to browse, for example tournament results and video reports. To access the tournament database, or participate in amateurgolf.com Tournament Series events, requires a paid membership which starts at $45/year. In just two years since launching this program, we are up to more than 3,000 Premium Members. Over 1500 of these players participated in our California or National events, including our flagship tournament at Bandon Dunes – the Two Man Links Championship.
2007 brought some important changes to the site, the most important being the introduction of video coverage, which has been a major success.
We kicked things off in May at the Carlton Woods Invitational, an up-and-coming event held in The Woodlands, Texas, and really hit our stride at the California State Amateur, where amateurgolf.com was the only media outlet to provide video coverage of the event. We were rewarded with more than 120,000 views of our five-day coverage, including 61,000 for the final match alone.
Since then we have branched out to include interviews with golfers at Torrey Pines in San Diego, site of the 2008 U.S. Open, where we tried to gauge just how difficult it was get a tee time at this popular muni, and how much the price fluctuated depending on where you lived.
The highlight of our video coverage thus far has to be our trip to the nation’s oldest tournament, the U.S. Amateur, held at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. You might have seen us on TV, saddling up next to the NBC cameras to get the best shots which were edited and posted on the web daily. Five days of coverage from San Francisco netted more than 210,000 views, including 133,000 from the championship match.
All things told, through August, we have produced 35 high-quality videos that have received more than 920,000 views.
For 2008, video coverage will play an increasingly important role in our coverage of amateur golf. This medium, will, in turn, provide quality opportunities for our top-tier sponsors. These opportunites would include a chance to run pre or post-run 15 second advertisements on all our videos that will help get your message out to some of the most avid amateur golfers in the world while showing your support of the tournaments in which they participate.
We will also be revamping our website in the coming year to devote an entire section to our video coverage. It is there we will be able to feature additional content from our sponsors, including new product releases, technological advances and instructional videos.
We got off to a great start with our video coverage in 2007, and we hope you can join us for another successful year in 2008.
For information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact Pete Wlodkowski at 760-929-9297 or petewl (at sign) amateurgolf.com.