Madrid Betar: Real Madrid Fan Platform

Real Madrid has one of the largest fan bases in the world, but most coverage is either club-controlled or generic aggregation. I co-founded Madrid Betar to build a dedicated home for serious, opinionated Real Madrid analysis across written pieces and football podcasts.

We grew from a standing start to 30,000 monthly active users, with 50,000 monthly visitors within six months, across the website and podcast channels. I ran editorial across five writers, setting the publishing cadence and the topics that actually moved engagement.

I ran the page on its analytics, not on instinct. A few patterns from the Facebook Page insights shaped editorial:

• Reach skewed to discovery. 60.6% of views came from non-followers versus 39.4% from followers, so the content was traveling well beyond our existing base, not just preaching to the choir.
• Format decided everything. Photos drove 89.1% of all views, far ahead of links (4.4%), text (4.2%), reels (1.8%), and multi-photo posts (0.5%).
• Peaks near 40,000 views in a reporting window across the December to March span, with a clear upward trajectory.

The read was straightforward: lead with photo posts, write headlines and captions for shareability, and optimize for the non-follower discovery surface rather than just feeding the followers we already had.

Source: Madrid Betar Facebook Page insights (views by content type and followers vs non-followers).

I built and launched the paid subscription tier, Madrid Betar Prime, owning pricing, packaging, and the free-to-paid conversion funnel. The first cohort converted 60 paying subscribers, validating that a niche, high-intent audience will pay for depth over volume.

Madrid Betar is the clearest example of me owning a product from zero: audience growth, editorial operations, and a monetization model with a real conversion funnel, not just a content hobby.