LEGA SERIE A RECEIVES THE GOLD CREATOR AWARD

Milan, November 27, 2018 - The football season is well under way, and YouTube is celebrating its popularity with over 1.6m subscribers to the Serie A TIM YouTube channel and being awarded the Gold Creator Award, for channels with more than a million subscribers. 

 

The recognition comes together with the channel’s great new features for this season - which are being optimised by IMG - including all weekly highlights in both Italian and in English. In addition, other contents include  a weekly collection of all the goals scored, each player’s best performances of the week, the week’s best moments; and interviews with leading personalities from Serie A TIM and much more, for a total of no fewer than 2500 clips each year. There is also an improved time-scale for online highlights. 

 

In the first ten match days of this season, the channel added 900,000 subscribers and had a total of over 180 million views of the outline content, more than 10 times as many as in the same period last season. Those figures are corroborated by the exponential growth in the involvement of the fans themselves: the channel now gets 2M interactions including likes, comments and shares. 

 

More than 2500 videos including best goals, match summaries, players of the week and interviews have been published on the Serie A TIM YouTube channel, which for this championship can boast an online presence the like of which has never been seen before. And an audience that equally ranges from Italian and international: half the channel’s viewing time is accounted for by viewers abroad, mainly in Indonesia, India, the US, the UK, Brazil, France, Vietnam, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Russia. 

 

These achievements have been made possible by an agreement between YouTube and Lega Serie A together with IMG Media Limited, leading producer and distributor of sports content, for the worldwide distribution and management of online sports content from the Serie A TIM through YouTube’s official channel for the 2015 – 2018 seasons. 

 

As part of the agreement, IMG Media Limited will also be able to deploy Content ID, the system developed by YouTube to enable copyright holders to readily identify and effectively manage the intellectual property rights connected with their content on YouTube.

 

Some facts about on the channel’s most viewed contents:

 

• The Highlights provide the most watched content on the channel. Juventus is still at No. 1, not least because five-times Ballon d’Or winner Cristiano Ronaldo has joined the team. The Bianconeri most-viewed video were: the Ronaldo's double in Juventus comeback win vs. Empoli (2-1, matchday 10); the first goal of CR7 with Juventus vs. Sassuolo (2-1, matchday 4); the 2-0 away win vs. Milan (matchday 12).

 

• The channel’s other playlist with the greatest following after the Highlights is Top Moments, followed by Every Goal, Exclusive Interviews and Round-up. The Top Moment with the most views was the fantastic counterattack and goal by Gervinho at 47' in the Parma-Cagliari match (2-0, matchday 5). Just a few views away from it the 100th Juventus goal at the San Siro Stadium scored by CR7 against MIlan (0-2, matchday 12). Then came the heart-warming celebration by Chiesa of his brother’s goal during the Fiorentina-SPAL game (3-0, also matchday 5), and Fabio Quagliarella’s insane back-heel volley score in the Sampdoria-Napoli game (3-0, matchday 3).

 

• This season’s exclusive content includes the journey of Gollini from Manchester United to Atalanta and the Insigne interview “They said I was too short to play football”, one of the most viewed videos of all.

 

“Thanks so much to everyone in the football community – Gaetano Miccichè, Lega Serie A’s Chairman says –. We’re very glad and honoured for this award and for the number of subscribers we’ve achieved, but we also want to increase them, offering always new and exclusive videos”.

 

Tim Wood, SVP Content and Channels, IMG Media, said: “This is an excellent start to our partnership with YouTube for Serie A TIM. We have, in a relatively short period of time, been able to optimise and enhance the offering and drive real fan engagement for the league’s worldwide digital audience".