Golf really isn’t boring – but we’ve got a lot to do to prove it

According to a recent survey golf is the most boring sport in the UK – 70% of people implied they’d rather watch paint dry.

Yesterday Justin Rose hit back, arguing golf’s in the best shape it’s ever been.

He’s right.

There are more extremely talented young players with big personalities and social followings to match in the game right now than there’s probably ever been, with golfers like Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Justin Thomas, and Jason Day leading the charge.

Add to that the return of golf’s GOAT, showing real signs of his former genius, and you’ve got as much interest and intrigue as any sport has right now.

And anyone who’s seen DJ ripping his driver down the fairway, or Spieth’s skill on the putting green from impossible distances would find it hard to argue there just isn’t the same excitement in golf.

The problem is few people outside of golf’s core know about these things, and they’re going to take some persuading.

Not enough is being done to promote these stories and moments on the platforms where the sought after younger, gen Z and millennial, audiences spend their time. All of it. Often glued to multiple screens.

That’s not to say nothing is being done, and I’m proud to say GolfMagic.com is doing its best to lead the charge.

Its social channels have grown from next to nothing to 160,000 golfers largely in the 18-35 demographic within the space of a year-and-a-half, site traffic has increased by 200% YoY, almost 400,000 golfers visit monthly, and content partnerships with brilliant progressive brands like TaylorMade, adidas, and Cobra Puma Golf have been forged to engage with them.

Last year we teamed up with Cobra Puma Golf and Arsenal Football Club to produce a series of golf football challenge videos starring Petr Cech, Hector Bellerin and Nacho Monreal.

We created in-depth technical product video reviews for all the biggest releases, including TaylorMade’s TP5/X ball and M3 and M4 lines, Cobra Puma Golf’s F8 range, Titleist’s 718 irons, PING’s G400 range, Srixon’s Launcher HB products, and many more.

Around major golf tournaments and sporting events, on top of extensive news and in-depth feature coverage of all the action, we created our own unique content to reach a wider, younger, non-core golf audience, including a GolfMagic showdown between Europe and America in a Ryder Cup beer pong special, and a golf version of the Rugby Six Nations.

For Halloween we got the world long drive champion Joe Miller to smash a golf ball through a pumpkin in slow motion, and for the winter we produced a series of easily accessible tips videos to encourage and help beginners, improvers and advanced golfers keep playing even when the weather turns to shit.

And we also landed exclusive interviews with Rory McIlroy and Jason Day thanks to some brilliance from our golf editor Andy Roberts and Nike.

We’re already working with major golf brands and digital media partners to plan out 2018’s standout content that will help us step it up again, and reach an even bigger audience.

Our aim is to reach a million monthly visitors to GolfMagic.com in the shortest space of time possible.

With the content we have in the pipeline for this year we should get a lot, lot closer.

Others have similar ambitions for growing golf online to attract more people to the sport, and the work the European Tour are doing, for example, is exceptional. Its content is original, appealing, and clearly has a digital first audience in mind, which is great to see.

In the US, digital innovators No Laying Up and Skratch TV are promoting golf in a less stuffy more engaging light, and have garnered a loyal following of hundreds of thousands.

It’s organisations like these that we have plans to work closely with this year, to combine our shared ambition to bring new life to golf, along with our resource, digital clout, and creative ideas.

But more than that we want to work with the big golf industry stakeholders in the UK and globally which, to date, haven’t taken as big a plunge into digital as is needed, for whatever reason.

Golf isn’t boring. But that’s how it’s seen by a lot of people and it’ll take a big, combined effort, from everyone in the golf industry to change that perception, and growing golf digitally is a good place to start.