NHL Nets First-Round ‘Win’ In Stanley Cup Online Video Sales — But Not A Lot Of Cash

imageThe Stanley Cup playoffs weren’t very kind to my hometown St. Louis Blues, swept by the Vancouver Canucks, but so far the post-season has been a winner for the NHL’s online video sales. Using a mix of database and contextual marketing, the league tells paidContent it has been able to boost playoff orders of NHL GameCenter Live by 50 percent — and revenue by 120 percent.

Mind you, we’re still talking incremental: in the first five days of the playoffs, the NHL took in $100,000, compared with $40,000 in 2008 — barely enough to keep Alex Ovechkin in pocket change. The bulk came in the first two days, when fans spent $70,000. More important for the league just now: the combination of the trajectory and the sense that it’s beginning to crack through the ice when it comes to targeting displaced fans.

More on target marketing and pricing after the jump.

Target marketing: Roughly 50 percent of the NHL’s fans live outside the market of their favorite team. When I logged into NHL.com — dubbed ThePortal for the playoffs — Tuesday night, the site sniffed the IP address from New York and started pitching me out-of-market games as I looked up various matches. A fan in Seattle who checks out the Washington Capitals-New York Rangers match tonight would be offered that game if it’s being streamed live but since I’m in New York, where the game would be blacked out, I wouldn’t get the message. Instead, when I called up the Chicago Blackhawks-Calgary Flames preview, I was offered a chance to “watch it live.” Clicking on that took me through to the GameCenter Live checkout counter.

So far, the biggest day included the first Caps-Rangers game. The league is also starting to see the payoff from creating a relational database with info from NHL>com registered users, NHL.com shoppers, fans who have registered for a GameCenter Live trial, etc. Conversions within the freely accessible GameCenter are running 200 percent, compared to NHL.com and direct e-mail.

Pricing: GameCenter Live sold day passes last year for $14.95; when the day pass was reintroduced a couple of weeks before this season ended to take advantage of Cup races, the price jumped to $19.95. The full Race for the Cup package runs $79 for “select” games and access to the Replay game archive. Nili R. Doft, senior director of Direct and Digital Marketing, told me: “We felt that at $19.95 we were still under a $20 price point and wouldn

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