About One

One

One, at one.co.il, is a Hebrew-language sports news website based in Tel Aviv and one of Israel's longest-established digital sports brands. Founded in 1998, at the height of the dot-com boom, it grew from a website built to accompany a television programme into Israel's most-watched sports site, and then reversed the usual direction of Israeli sports media by launching its own television channels in 2011. It publishes football, basketball and wider Israeli and world sport news, results, opinion and video in Hebrew; as an early English-language report on the site put it, readers who want online sports news in Israel about Israeli sports go to One, and their Hebrew needs to be good, because the site has no English-language version.

Founded in 1998 around the 91st Minute

One was founded by Udi Milner and Gil Menkin through their internet company Citynet, known in Hebrew as Sitinet. Milner was 25 and Menkin 22. Their entry into sports media was a proposal to broadcaster Yoram Arbel: they offered to build, free of charge, a website for Arbel's Channel 2 programme Hadaka Ha-91, the 91st Minute, which summarised each round of the Israeli Premier League. The site initially carried the programme's name and covered the Premier League in a limited way, drawing mainly on the television show and the printed press.

The response showed how underserved Israeli sports fans were online. After the programme left the air, Arbel himself entered the partnership, investing several tens of thousands of dollars in return for shares, and the site was relaunched under the new name One. The name was chosen because it was catchy and simple, and because it was available for registration with an Israeli domain suffix. In May 2000 the production company and Channel 2 franchisee Telad bought about 40 percent of Citynet, the site's owner, for one million dollars, at a company valuation of about three million dollars. After that purchase Milner and Menkin each held about 25 percent of the shares and Arbel about 9 percent. Telad presented the purchase of Citynet as a starting platform for activity in internet and electronic commerce, complementing its work as a content company, and Citynet was also expected to build non-sport sites for Telad. When Telad later lost the Channel 2 tender, the Kaedan media group bought its stake.

Surviving the dot-com crash and taking the lead

The collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001 closed many Israeli sports websites, and One emerged from that shake-out as the leading sports site in Israel. The editorial team took shape in the same period. In 2001 Ophira Asayag joined the site as a news-flash reporter and soon became its reporters' coordinator and content manager, the figure who ran its news-gathering operation. Columnists became part of the brand as well: One's named opinion writers have included the former footballers Eyal Berkovic and Haim Revivo and the basketball coach Zvika Sherf, giving the site voices drawn from inside Israeli football and basketball rather than from journalism alone.

One also experimented earlier than most Israeli sites with charging readers. In April 2002 it was one of the first content sites in Israel to operate a paywall, launching an online magazine called BIG ONE in partnership with Netvision at big.one.co.il, for paying subscribers only. The paid site offered investigations, analysis, personal columns and gossip from the sports community for 2.99 dollars a month or an annual subscription of 29.99 dollars. It did not recruit a significant number of subscribers and closed after a few years. In that period about half of the site's revenue came from advertising; another important source was selling content to other websites and to the cellular companies, above all a service of continuous real-time updates and headlines refreshed every minute, delivered by voice and by SMS text message.

How the early newsroom worked

Reporting in Globes on the site's first decade gives a detailed picture of the operation at its mid-2000s peak. The newsroom employed about 60 reporters. A reporter was attached to every Premier League football club and every basketball club, equipped with a computer, a digital camera and a video camera, sending news and filmed video reports from the grounds each day; about two million minutes of that video were watched on the site each month. Seven additional video crews worked for the desk, alongside flash-news presenters and an editing team, with bulletins broadcast twice a day from a small studio and stories and flashes updated over 20 hours a day. A separate system updated all developments on the pitch automatically, every minute, during matches.

An audience measured in millions

The audience figures of that era explain the site's standing. One was the most-viewed sports site in Israel; Teleseker TIM data for 2005 ranked it ninth among all sites used by Israeli surfers, with 15.5 percent of respondents saying they had visited it in the survey week — the only niche site in a top ten otherwise made up of search engines, news sites and general portals. Milner put daily visitors at about 300,000 and monthly visitors at more than a million. An earlier 2003 account, when the site was five years old, recorded about 350,000 visits a month lasting 10 to 12 minutes each, a readership that was 80 to 85 percent men, half of them under 25, many checking updated headlines in the middle of the working day — and already noted that a quarter of revenue came from selling content to cellular companies.

Rivalry and the shape of Israeli sports coverage

One's defining rivalry is with Sport5, the website of the Sports Channel operated by the RGE group. Academic surveys of Israeli media concentration describe the contrast neatly: Sport 5 began as a television channel that launched a popular website, while its online competitor One went the opposite way. The two brands frame the market for Hebrew sports news online, dividing the audience for live results, transfer news and football and basketball analysis. Exposure surveys illustrate One's durability in that contest: in the TIM internet survey for July 2010, reported by Globes, One's weekly exposure stood at 13.4 percent, fractionally ahead of Sport 5 at 13.3 percent, after both fell sharply at the end of the 2010 World Cup. In the normalised online-news market-share tables covering 2008 and 2012, One registered 4.1 and 4.0 percent of total online news exposure — small beside the great general portals, but the standing of a leading specialist title.

The move into television in 2011

In November 2010, despite opposition from figures in Israeli sports media led by representatives of the Sports Channel, the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting approved the establishment of a ONE television channel. Broadcasts began in January 2011 on channel 50 on both HOT and yes, with an HD channel on HOT from launch and HD added on yes in August 2015. The channel is owned by the operators of the One website, Citynet Ltd together with the Yedioth Ahronoth Group, which is also described in media studies as a part-owner of the website itself.

At first the channel broadcast mainly magazine programmes about sport and adjacent subjects such as sports economics and the internet coverage of sport, together with competitions from sports that are less popular in Israel. Its rights portfolio necessarily differed from its rivals': the competitions Israeli fans most wanted, the domestic Premier League, Spain's La Liga and England's Premier League, were broadcast by channels owned by Charlton and the Sports Channel. Alongside the launch, Kol Israel ceased broadcasting its radio programme Songs and Goals, and the ONE channel began a programme in a similar format, Shabbat shel Kaduregel, a Saturday of football hosted by Sharon Perry, carrying reports from Premier League grounds without pictures while a results board ran at the side of the screen. In 2013, despite the website's own campaigning against the migration of significant content to paid channels, the channel applied to open an additional paid channel, to be called ONE LIVE, for live sports competitions.

Four channels and broadcast rights

The television operation has since grown into a family of four sports channels: ONE, ONE 2, ONE DOCO and ONE EDGE, broadcasting in Hebrew in 1080i high definition. They are carried across Israel's television platforms, including HOT, yes, Cellcom TV+, Partner TV+, NEXT TV, Sting+ and FreeTV, with the flagship ONE channel at position 50 on the main platforms. The channel's broadcast history includes rights and coverage cited in its deal announcements: Spanish league football, the X Games, Formula 2, Maccabi Tel Aviv's Euroleague basketball games and the Israeli Basketball Super League, and a 1.2-million-household reach was quoted for the channel when it won lacrosse broadcast rights, alongside about two million monthly visitors to the website. For a website founded in 1998 to support a single television summary show, owning a four-channel television broadcaster is a remarkable inversion, and it is central to what the One brand now is.

Coverage and audience today

The website remains the core of the brand. Its coverage is led by Israeli football and basketball — the Premier League clubs and basketball teams to which it has attached reporters since its early years — and extends across world football, the NBA and other international sport, with news articles, player statistics, game analysis, live updates, opinion columns and video. Its business, first documented in the SMS era, has always mixed direct readership with content supply: from its earliest years One sold its continuously updated sports content to other internet sites, to cable and satellite television companies and to cellular providers, a syndication instinct it shares with few other Israeli niche sites.

Assessed as an online-news outlet, One is a specialist that behaves like a generalist: a Hebrew sports desk with a mass audience, a television arm, named star columnists and a continuous-results service, rooted in Tel Aviv's media industry. Its history spans the full arc of Israeli internet media — dot-com founding, bubble-era investment by a television franchisee, survival of the crash, an early paywall experiment, mobile content sales before smartphones, and finally expansion back into the television medium it was created to serve.