Green Growth of the Sports Media Business and Competitive Analysis

The research presents an analysis of the sports media market and its green growth. Based on the methods of descriptive statistics, the authors conducted a structural analysis of the top sports Internet projects in Russia and presented the social portrait of the target audience. The authors assessed the effectiveness of advertising planning tools and the organization of advertising activities of the online publication of Sports.ru considering one of the basic principles of green growth—the involvement of representatives of various sectors of society in the decision-making process. Furthermore, the authors identified trends in the development of the studied industry and conducted a SWOT analysis of one of the participants (Sports.ru). In addition to the increase in the number of audiences, the growth in advertising budgets in online media is associated with the constant complication of advertising message formats. A few years ago, advertising in online publications consisted mainly of banners and paid publications. Nowadays, more online media are striving to create complex, unique products for advertisers—special projects, games, individual sites, etc. The income growth is not accidental. If we compare the ten online publications with the highest audience numbers, then the total audience grew from 237.7 million visitors to 279.8 million over the year (from May 2021 to May 2022). The growth of online media advertising budgets is directly related to the quantitative growth of its audience.