Football and Girls? DewiBola Delivers 3 Million Pageviews Worth Every Month

Indonesian sporting news portal DewiBola.com (or in English, “Ball Goddess”) offers more than just football and men’s lifestyle content – it also offers news and pictures of beautiful girls! Romeo Reijman, the co-founder of DewiBola, talked with us regarding DewiBola’s interesting niche, and how the website can achieve around three million page views per month in only its third month running, and without any paid promotion.

The website’s look is really clean and smooth. There are no pesky ads seen on any part of the site. Romeo explained his ambition to us by saying that the main goal in the first year is to become the number one soccer portal in Indonesia first, and a revenue model comes after that.

Romeo shared to us regarding the site’s statistics. The site was launched in June 2012 [1], and last month it had 3.4 million page views with around 500,000+ unique users per month. Currently page per visits is almost up to 10 or 11 after the team has revised the content and optimized the pages.

So how did the site achieve its amazing stats? DewiBola is a product collaboration between the marketing agency Exo Digital Agency and Indonesian news portal KapanLagi.com. Exo claims to own the biggest online Facebook football community in Indonesia with over four million Facebook fans, which was very important to the collaboration with DewiBola. That would explain the high number of pageviews coming through. Exo takes care of the traffic to DewiBola while KapanLagi takes care of all the content on the sports site.

Exo has created a number of online Facebook communities, such as the Indonesian national team’s Facebook fanpage since 2010, and also fanpages for some national players such as Irfan Bachdim and Diego Michiels. Romeo explained that Indonesians are very nationalistic and amazing football fans, so it was not that difficult to gather their support on Facebook.

Purely for research purpose only, I browsed through the girls section on the site. It offers nice pictures of football-related women, though the focus is on WAGs – a British tabloid term for the wives and girlfriends of top footballers. Interestingly, sometimes the content also offers gossip surrounding the WAGs’ love lives.

I would guess that male readers care only for sexy pics, and not much for the stories behind them. So I asked Romeo if its purpose is to build up the female readership. Romeo simply answered that they don’t have a fixed market group yet, and is open to a larger female readership. Good news for the boys out there: Romeo stresses that the gossip items are still going to be complemented by some nice pictures.

DewiBola’s investment purely comes from its collaboration with KapanLagi [2] at the moment. Romeo told us that what makes the site different from its competitors is its non-football sections that discuss the latest trends in men’s lifestyles, and of course, its girls section plays an important part too. He said:

Having the Girls and Lifestyle sections is a way “to fill the gap that some [football] portals can’t fulfill.”