Aphetor

Aphetor is The Creator Games. It’s a brand, media company and community that is winning in the Engagement Economy by re-imagining sport and entertainment for a born-digital fan.

Sports’ biggest challenge is how to engage, connect with and be relevant to a new generation of fan. However, it’s not because young fans don’t like sport (74% of GenZ follow sport on a regular basis, the most amongst all age groups[1]). Rather, it’s because changing media consumption patterns means that this generation watches considerably less sport on TV than older generations and TV remains the center of Traditional Sport’s commercial model (only 31% of this generation watch sport on TV, compared to 75% of those aged 55+[2]). Aphetor gives this generation Sport on their terms: the content formats they love on the devices and channels they choose with the interactivity they expect.

So, here’s how it works: we partner with the world’s coolest Rightsowners to create a series of epic, multi-challenge events where the competitors are the world’s best Content Creators. The magic is that we turn over the content creation and distribution to the competing Creators, giving us a vast ecosystem of high-performing social content, broad distribution and access to an aggregate audience of millions. 

Aphetor aggregates the Creator Content with our own premium content, cross-pollinating views and optimizing content performance across the ecosystem.  We also add interactivity, like voting and taking part in the challenges, that drives further engagement by making the fans part of the action.

In the first instance, we generate revenue by monetizing our content views and audience reach via sponsorship and media/advertising. However, as we build our community of fans, we will increasingly monetise them directly through memberships, tickets, merch, PPV, fantasy/gaming and digital assets.

We have already staged 2 pilot events that exceeded our expectations, delivering over 130m views across more than 2,500 pieces of social content, which proved the fundamentals of our model. After pivoting to make our model more scalable and commercially viable, we are ready for lift off.  We have a minimum of 4 events scheduled for 2024 and, with the help of this grant, we will scale our technical infrastructure and operations to allow us to deliver 16 events per year in 2026. By then, we will be producing around 38,000 content posts with 8bn total views and inspiring the 32 million active fans in our community to live life to the max, compete, collaborate, co-create and push their boundaries virtually and in real life.

[1] YouGov: The Global Sports Media Landscape, 2023

[2] YouGov: The Global Sports Media Landscape, 2023