Gazzetta.gr is one of the biggest and most visited Greek websites. In fact, it is more than that, it is to my knowledge the most visited website (worldwide) built in Joomla. In Greece there is a huge sports news market – in fact there are possibly 6-7 daily nationwide sports newspapers. That translates of course well to the web market where sports websites are dominating the local traffic rankings (Alexa Rankings). I do not want to get into comparisons with “normal” newspapers / news websites traffic-wise and what that might mean for the local population (hint: it is depressing).

I am performing a leap of faith here, but speaking of qualitatively homogenous populations (assuming that they are) I expect the same percentage of users to be accessing their favorite source of information via google search. According to that assumption we could possibly offer an estimate of rank according to traffic.

I can attribute gazzetta.gr ‘s popularity not only to its aesthetics and its’ exclusivity and team of writers- vastly superior IMHO to its competitors, kudos to Komrade and Wedia – but also to it’s great community features.

By enabling the community to speak their mind in the usually flaming comments section, users come back to check replies on the things that they posted. This not only largely increases time spent on site (obvious) but offers some qualitative data on the visitors of the site.

This exact data must not have been overlooked when leoforos.gr (a website targeted to Panathinaikos fans) and katimagiko.gr (targeted to Olympiakos fans) were launched. I have no tangible evidence that the aforementioned websites belong to the same group, but their linking strategies and style clearly just reinforce this belief.

Although I’m not a big fan of Greek sports journalism – quite the contrary – I have to acknowledge the greatness of this business move on group Gazzetta.gr ‘s behalf. The niche ultras’ market has been saturated (hey, there is only a limited amount of news every day on e.g. Panathinaikos) , but the market was lacking. Maybe it was the lack of funds, lack of vision, lack of knowledge or a combination of all, but group Gazzetta’s competitors in their respective niches really fell short.
On the contrary Gazzetta.gr used perfectly their resources and experience to dominate the niches market.

Long story short; a perfect example, a poster child of SWOT analysis made reality. Good job gazzetta team.