Play Money: A Bogey for Tiger Woods

Baldwin Louie — Tue, 29 May 2001 15:00:00 -0700

Tiger Woods is one of the very few performers whose celebrity transcends his sport. Yet the traffic on Woods' Web site has been – dare we say it? – subpar.

Tigerwoods.com attracts about 150,000 unique visitors a month, according to sports marketing/management agency IMG. That's less than 2 percent of the traffic that top sports site ESPN.com draws during the same amount of time.

And Tiger's case is not unique. Aside from Anna Kournikova, celebrity athlete sites just haven't worked.

That's not to say that the e-populace isn't interested. DomainSurfer.com counts 178 sites with "Tigerwoods" as part of their domain name, and 163 that include "Kournikova." Undoubtedly, hundreds of additional sites use some portion of their names in different languages.

Woods was one of three larger-than-life athletes that SportsLine.com signed three years ago to endorsement deals – as much to prop up the SportsLine IPO as for any other reason. Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal were the other two.

Now that the standalone celebrity-athlete model has proven ineffectual, IMG is taking back Tiger's Web rights. Sure, a press release will come out Wednesday to the effect that SportsLine has re-signed Tiger for another two years, but make no mistake: It's for far less money and barter, and while SportsLine will still have a link, the site's hosting and content responsibilities have moved to TWI Interactive, IMG's new-media arm.

IMG has come to the conclusion that it's better to control Tiger's digital assets than to just sell them to the highest bidder. One reason is that Tiger's other endorsers, including Nike, weren't particularly amused when SportsLine tried to sell them the site – rights the sponsors thought they already owned.

Under the new arrangement, Tigerwoods.com will serve as storefronts for licensees such as Nike and Electronic Arts. These days, the hybrid model is the only model. That's a fact that should be taken to heart by anyone trying to make money with a combination of sports and the Web.

"It's a definite shift in approach," said Todd McCormack, CEO of TWI Interactive. "We're not looking at this as an endorsement, but as a strategic asset we have to protect to manage a player's commercial and professional career. This is the way it would have gone if the marketplace hadn't been so crazy at the beginning."

On the content side, Tigerwoods.com will have a new look and feel starting later this week. TWI hopes to add broadband events such as Tiger's charitable clinics. IMG also is close to completing a content-swap deal with the PGA that would allow live scoring, and video and audio highlights after each tournament round.

Taking Tiger's rights in-house also will allow IMG to sell sites in other languages, which means that a Japanese site is a certainty. And for all his endorsements, Woods is strangely without a tech sponsor; surely there's a tech company out there that wants to sponsor his Web site.

Still, the biggest message is that Tiger's Web rights, and therefore everyone else's, are now just a means to an end, rather than end in themselves. Even for an icon like Tiger, Internet rights can't stand alone.

"We never would have gotten the numbers we got from Nike [in their recent renewal] without the integrated approach we took to online," said Rob McNamara, who handles Woods' interactive activities for IMG's "Team Tiger" management squad.

IMG, which invented sports marketing in the 1960s with another pretty fair golfer named Arnold Palmer, is once again on the green, way ahead of the rest of the field.

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Play Money: A Bogey for Tiger Woods