Smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin have teamed up again to build a User Needs for Sports Model. The goal is simple: help sports publishers everywhere create stories that are genuinely valuable for a clearly defined audience.

Which audience need are you actually serving with a sports platform?

The possibilities are endless. Somewhere, a ball is always rolling.

To create a robust, sports-specific framework, we analysed more than 35,000 sports articles, trained an AI model that recognises 11 distinct sports user needs, and discovered a pattern that is both familiar and surprising:

The content that drives the most engagement is published the least

Fill in the form below to find a PDF with our findings. It's the presentation of a webinar we held on March 5th, 2026. You can still watch the recording. Sign up right here.