iFollow for 2020-21Season

Erm it wasn't even a whoosh it was an exclamation that anyone would even entertain the thought they might be able to sit in their seats!

I would like to think that you have got this information from a reliable source but, as I understand the way things are at the moment and my information is from the club itself, there is no set level of attendance nor is it guaranteed that a season ticket holder will get their regular seat.
Click to expand...
 
www.dailymail.co.uk

EFL make Sky Sports deal for clubs in ALL divisions to stream matches

EXCLUSIVE BY MATT HUGHES: The EFL have reached a ground-breaking deal with Sky Sports that will enable clubs in all three divisions to stream every match next season live.
www.dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk

Sorry if this has appeared on another thread but does 'via club websites' still mean 'via iFollow'? Look forward to them agreeing the L1/L2 shared revenue model......especially after the salary cap vote.
 
Any reason why clubs cannot just sell the tickets (for streaming) as they normal would? So eg we sell 1500 for away fans and the rest to capacity for Home Fans and games are streamed on each clubs site.
 
horseman said:
Any reason why clubs cannot just sell the tickets (for streaming) as they normal would? So eg we sell 1500 for away fans and the rest to capacity for Home Fans and games are streamed on each clubs site.
Click to expand...

I'm assuming you mean that we stream to our own site rather than through iFollow? If that's the case, it simply doesn't make sense to have 48 league one and two clubs operating their own system when you can tap into a national structure that does everything for you.

As for selling the tickets, why limit Sunderland for example to 1500 virtual tickets when 30,000 want to stream it?
 
Scotchegg said:
I'm assuming you mean that we stream to our own site rather than through iFollow? If that's the case, it simply doesn't make sense to have 48 league one and two clubs operating their own system when you can tap into a national structure that does everything for you.

As for selling the tickets, why limit Sunderland for example to 1500 virtual tickets when 30,000 want to stream it?
Click to expand...


I think the revenue distribution is to avoid big clubs selling for instance 20,000 views for an away game and the home club gets no benefit.
 
MarkG said:
I think the revenue distribution is to avoid big clubs selling for instance 20,000 views for an away game and the home club gets no benefit.
Click to expand...
One of many reasons why people saying there wasn’t enough revenue in making the season streaming only from the off was nonsense. The home club takes the gate receipts at a normal League match anyway - the away side only takes a nominal fee (maybe around £1 a pop) for handling the tickets that they sell through their ticket office.

You aren’t just opening yourself up to your own fan base on a national and international level with streaming. You’re opening yourself up to every household of every fan of every club that you play, and taking ‘gate receipts’ from them as well. You’re essentially eliminating any notion of a capacity in your ‘away end’ in this scenario. It’s uncapped capacity and all demand can be met, and all revenue therefore taken.

Been saying it since April - football missed a trick here.
 
RyanioBirdio said:
One of many reasons why people saying there wasn’t enough revenue in making the season streaming only from the off was nonsense. The home club takes the gate receipts at a normal League match anyway - the away side only takes a nominal fee (maybe around £1 a pop) for handling the tickets that they sell through their ticket office.

You aren’t just opening yourself up to your own fan base on a national and international level with streaming. You’re opening yourself up to every household of every fan of every club that you play, and taking ‘gate receipts’ from them as well. You’re essentially eliminating any notion of a capacity in your ‘away end’ in this scenario. It’s uncapped capacity and all demand can be met, and all revenue therefore taken.

Been saying it since April - football missed a trick here.
Click to expand...

The only slight drawback to offset this is that the streaming price is half the ticket price of one adult ticket, who can then put it on the telly and have a bubble round to watch it. So we would have to oversell by a margin more than the usual box office sales in order to recoup the value.

But as you say, having the capacity for 20,000 Sunderland fans to pay for their away match at the Kassam second game in, rather than the 2,000 odd that we can usually accomodate, should make it worth it in most instances.
 
RyanioBirdio said:
One of many reasons why people saying there wasn’t enough revenue in making the season streaming only from the off was nonsense. The home club takes the gate receipts at a normal League match anyway - the away side only takes a nominal fee (maybe around £1 a pop) for handling the tickets that they sell through their ticket office.

You aren’t just opening yourself up to your own fan base on a national and international level with streaming. You’re opening yourself up to every household of every fan of every club that you play, and taking ‘gate receipts’ from them as well. You’re essentially eliminating any notion of a capacity in your ‘away end’ in this scenario. It’s uncapped capacity and all demand can be met, and all revenue therefore taken.

Been saying it since April - football missed a trick here.
Click to expand...
So it looks like L1 and L2 are accepting streaming but there needs to be a fair way of distributing the revenues. Obviously I don't want to sign up to 23 different i-follows for each away game so would want to just have one account for home and away.

I think Andy Holt's point was when asked by Sunderland if they could live stream a sold-out Accrington away game, his replay was why should he pay £10,000 or whatever it costs to set up and broadcast, for Sunderland to then pocket the cash from their fans who pay to stream the game. Though the parasites would probably find an internet link to avoid paying anyway.
 
beyondthefourth said:
The only slight drawback to offset this is that the streaming price is half the ticket price of one adult ticket, who can then put it on the telly and have a bubble round to watch it. So we would have to oversell by a margin more than the usual box office sales in order to recoup the value.

But as you say, having the capacity for 20,000 Sunderland fans to pay for their away match at the Kassam second game in, rather than the 2,000 odd that we can usually accomodate, should make it worth it in most instances.
Click to expand...
The numbers would’ve been there when you throw in households of people all over the country as well as abroad who can’t usually go to games anyway, plus the uncapped access to every single away supporter who now doesn’t have to spend £80 on fuel, food, parking, tickets etc, or who simply can’t dedicate an entire day to it rather than the few hours they get away with for home games. Or both. Can you be free from 3-5? Do you have £15? Great. You can ‘go to’ the game, whether you’re in your living room or simply looking at your phone. Plus the marketing ability from having direct access to every single fan, in real time at that. Live special offers, ecommerce data collection, creative merchandising and limited edition items for match pass holders, virtual 50/50 draws - there is simply no way we wouldn’t have made at least as much money as getting a few thousand ST holders to cough up at multiple price points for the same thing, potentially having some of them who can’t attend at reduced capacity and all the nonsense that brings with it, probably no walk-ups for most if not all of the season anyway as well as no away ticket handling fees...

It’s there. It’s all there. And even when crowds can come back, you’ve got a whole new world ready to go. America has smashed this clean out of the park for years - an amazing hybrid of access where you can watch every single game of every single sport, and stadiums and arenas alike are still packed. Because people would rather have the experience of being there live and in the flesh, but for those who simply can’t there is still the option and with it the revenue. Why is every single game we play that’s put on television currently still attended as normal? Why do we sell out the cup games that are on Sky for £7 for a day pass, or on BBC for free? Why are the regular league fixtures that are occasionally on still attended by a perfectly normal, regular size crowd? People want to be there. Football as a whole is lazy and short sighted, and has an irrational fear that just because you point a camera at a football pitch nobody will want to go and sit in the stands anymore, even though access to football over the last 30 years turned dwindling crowds into sold out super stadiums. Pies, programmes and salary caps are much easier to cling to, rather than looking at something that is actually about more than just this one season - it would increase revenue streams for years to come.

I’ve been willing to die on this hill before, when I intentionally discarded newsstand sales at a music magazine I ran in favour of selling globally through our own e-commerce platform. I didn’t want to depend on Tesco and Sainsbury or the corner shops of Ipswich and Inverness for an existence, I wanted to bring all revenue in house where we controlled sales, didn’t have to share margins with the retailer, slashed distribution costs but most importantly, gathered data and access to every single person who ever made a purchase. I then set about creating higher tiered price points, so rather than just selling a magazine for a fiver we had a package at £15 that included a piece of merch of the cover artist, for £30 you could get a better piece of merch as well as something signed by the band etc. I then started buying and selling exclusive variants of albums by the artists that the brand covered, and got the online store chart registered so that they counted towards chart positions. I did deals with artists for exclusive merch designs and cut them in on the profits, so we became a source of revenue for bands rather than merely a source of exposure. And sales grew because we had all the data, so we could see every person who ever ordered something of a certain band, or a certain type of product, or from within certain price points, and create a section of VIP customers who ordered the most often. We could then target them whenever we had relevant new items, give them exclusive discount codes, early access to sales... by the end of year two we were making more money than we ever made just selling magazines off a shelf that we had to pay somebody to be on. Everybody said it was suicide and would be the end of the business. “You can’t survive unless you just dump the issue on the shelves and hope enough people buy it. That’s how it works; that’s the way it’s always been.” That company is now one of the only alternative music magazines left in operation, while the likes of Q, Kerrang! and the NME no longer exist as anything more than a website that can’t generate enough cash to pay more than two or three staff. We were a small independent company owned by one man who sat in the corner, while all the others were owned by billion-pound global publishers. And absolutely everything on the business side was done by just me and an owner in his fifties who knew nothing about the internet or e-commerce when we started. From the initial idea, all the way through every step of implementation and setup, right the way through to the day-to-day operations - two people built and maintained it all. So any company can do something similar and to scale. And not only is that company still pretty much the only one left in its sector, but it’s got twice the number of people working there that it did when it all started changing. So it isn’t just surviving, it is actively growing and thriving.

Sorry - I’m aware of the essay this has been, and most people probably won’t give a damn and will still disagree - but I know football has got this wrong. It’s got no idea of the opportunity it is passing up, and America alone is sat there waving at everybody and pointing at how it’s done. The world isn’t the same anymore, it changed before Covid let alone since, and so it’s about time that the people in charge of the game started acting like they have a clue what they’re doing, or give a damn about anybody outside of the biggest 30-odd clubs.
 
I've opted out of my 2020-21 iFollow sub pending details of the new offering but had to do it by email to ifollow@efl.com. Their reply included the following on the current log in issue:

"We are currently undergoing some essential upgrades to our platform so have had to disable the ability to log in so we can get the upgrades in place. We are looking to complete these upgrades by 25th August, but highly recommend that you sign up here to be the first to hear about the upcoming changes."
 
MarkG said:
So it looks like L1 and L2 are accepting streaming but there needs to be a fair way of distributing the revenues. Obviously I don't want to sign up to 23 different i-follows for each away game so would want to just have one account for home and away.

I think Andy Holt's point was when asked by Sunderland if they could live stream a sold-out Accrington away game, his replay was why should he pay £10,000 or whatever it costs to set up and broadcast, for Sunderland to then pocket the cash from their fans who pay to stream the game. Though the parasites would probably find an internet link to avoid paying anyway.
Click to expand...

You only have to join Oxford's iFollow.

The matchday passes have been an option for most midweek games last season, and you pay through the Oxford site for all of them home or away.

I believe the clubs then get 40% of the revenue made from selling the match passes.
 
I received an email from ifollow at the beginning of July informing me they’d reimburse me 19% of my fee for the 19/20 season within 28 days.

we are now well beyond that and still no refund. Today I sent them an email - firstly enquiring why my reimbursement was only 19% while others’ more; secondly complaining about the late payment.

I wonder if they’ll appreciate my reminder of the EFL’s usual stance on late payments...
 

Attachments

  • E37D2004-A401-4D9C-A10B-C0BA61B4AC51.jpeg
    E37D2004-A401-4D9C-A10B-C0BA61B4AC51.jpeg
    813.1 KB · Views: 24
I, and quite a few others, have received payment. Check your credit card maybe.
 
Malc said:
I, and quite a few others, have received payment. Check your credit card maybe.
Click to expand...
This made us check back and we had notification also about a pending refund. So far, nothing has been paid into my accounts. Looks like there has been some hit and miss accounting by iFollow. What a surprise. They are, after all, Muppets.
 
RyanioBirdio said:
The numbers would’ve been there when you throw in households of people all over the country as well as abroad who can’t usually go to games anyway, plus the uncapped access to every single away supporter who now doesn’t have to spend £80 on fuel, food, parking, tickets etc, or who simply can’t dedicate an entire day to it rather than the few hours they get away with for home games.
Click to expand...


Hey, what's this magic website and who are the bands?
 
Why not just have the home team is responsible for streaming every game, but they keep all of the revenue?
 
HampshireYellow said:
Why not just have the home team is responsible for streaming every game, but they keep all of the revenue?
Click to expand...
I suppose the Sunderland argument is :-
for an away game where we would have an allocation of say 500 (AFC Wimbledon in the past), why should AFCW pocket potentially 10,000 streams from Sunderland fans.
 
But isn’t that the same argument as to if they brought thousands of fans in person to, say, MK Dons? Thems the breaks
 
  • React
Reactions: ljs
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

T
Friday iFollow
Replies
3
Views
284
TOPCAT
T
Grumpy Git
Does this thing iFollow work?
2
Replies
24
Views
2K
Manorlounger
Manorlounger
O
End of iFollow
2 3 4
Replies
60
Views
7K
Grumpy Git
Grumpy Git
Neville60
ifollow not working
2
Replies
34
Views
5K
Manorlounger
Manorlounger
B
iFollow
2 3
Replies
42
Views
5K
Oxford57
Oxford57
Back
Top Bottom