In January, the Australian Open (AO) tennis event welcomed 900,000 in-person attendees, while remote viewers could participate in the metaverse.
This year, the Australian Open is expanding its web3 offerings to enhance accessibility for sporting fans and offer new forms of entertainment. The virtual events included AO ArtBall 2023 and the AO metaverse, which featured NFTs linked to a specific area on the tennis court, providing benefits such as wearables and passes for future tournaments to NFT owners.
Their strategy focused on adding value to NFT owners and engaging fans year-round. However, maintaining a consistent revenue stream proved challenging, with most earnings reinvested into services. To increase community engagement, the Australian open offered unique experiences such as behind-the-scenes footage and access to party events on the metaverse. The venture is considered a success in the web3 sports events realm.
The metaverse can provide a way to extend fan engagement throughout the year and create an “evergreen model for twelve months of the year” using Web3 tools.
The current Australian Open kids game in Roblox has already garnered 6.3 million visits, which Plummer sees as a way to expand the brand globally. While these kids may not have purchasing power now, exposing them to the Australian Open brand through games could influence them to add the event to their bucket list and potentially become future attendees.
For some Australian Open fans, a particular point in a match meant more than just an exciting moment. Using the Hawk-Eye system, officials determined precisely where the ball landed on the court, and this final “bounce” was linked to an NFT. The fan who owned the NFT associated with that point won tickets to next year’s tournament, and the value of the NFT increased.
This NFT experiment is just one part of the Australian Open’s embrace of Web3, which includes creating a replica of Rod Laver Arena and its surroundings in Decentraland. The platform had 175,000 unique sessions from 157 countries during the 2022 Australian Open, and it launched Artball NFTs, which offer certain perks to their owners. The Australian Open’s use of Web3 tools is noteworthy, as it demonstrates how traditional brands can engage with customers in new ways.
Fans engagement re-imagined
Last year we wrote about football fan tokens taking off as individual soccer clubs began to experiment with tokenization and NFT’s. Successful clubs like Porto FC, La Liga, Liverpool and others saw the benefits of exploring blockchain technology to engage with an existing and future fan base.
Adding to this, Upland Metaverse successfully partnered with FIFA for the Qatar World Cup and went on to announce another partnership with Argentine Football Club that would allow them to extend their reach into the digital world and play with some new innovations around fan support. More recently, Sorare excited the UK market, making a big announcement of their new partnership with the Premier League to bring their popular digital trading game to football fans around the UK.
It is clear that the physical world of sports and virtual world of entertainment is collaborating more. As organisations continue to explore the realms of opportunity for future fan engagement, the metaverse will certainly offer online environments to provide extra layers of sporting entertainment.
