Summer Results: What We've Done and Prepared For a Following Season

This summer for Watchers wasn’t relaxing but fruitful. It started with a huge spike at the Champions League Final (read how fans prepared for the game, by the way!). Soon after, one of the most expanded World Cups began. During the tournament, we developed our product, launched new features, supported new partners, and visited conferences and expos worldwide. Check out Watchers summer results and what we've prepared for autumn.

Numbers

From June 11 to July 19, 2026, Watchers powered 795 match rooms for 31 sports brands across four regions, bringing a live social layer —match chats, copy-widgets, and AI moderation—to the biggest World Cup in history.

Compared with each brand’s regular club-season baseline from April 1 to June 10, the tournament created a significant engagement boost. For the most active brands, in-chat DAU grew by as much as 7× during the World Cup.

The effect was more than just activity. Watchers’ social features helped increase the lifetime value (LTV) by about 10–15%. The copy-widget showed a strong community spirit: the top 5% of sharers created one-third of all copies. In other words, recognised tipsters in the community.

Beyond football, World Clap Day chats became worldwide and lively. About 50% of monthly active users sent messages in chat, instead of just reading or reacting. This is much higher than the usual rate, where 20–25% of users actively join conversations.

Cases

The FIFA World Cup

The FIFA World Cup was the overall case for all our sports clients: this tournament was supported everywhere, so we needed to guarantee that all clusters would be prepared for every spike. And spikes happened not just during the most trendy teams' games, but all the time, with various nationals. Thus, the spike for our Latin America clients was higher for Mexico vs South Africa than for the Spain vs Argentina final. We also prepared semantic analysis for all chat rooms during the World Cup and found that most of the conversation can be qualified as high-quality and meaningful–people discussed football, predictions, and their actions on the host platform.

Read the case study and download the report with the results

World Clap Day

World Clap Day, a simple idea that brought together tens of thousands of people worldwide, could have spread through social networks. But we helped the project bring interested people to the website using our built-in social features. As a result, 35 thousand unique users from over 100 countries chatted, sending hundreds of thousands of messages.

Read the case study

New Features

• Fan clubs were released right before the World Cup to help our sports clients’ users showcase dedication to the national team and, if activated, communicate not just in a common chat but in their favourite team chats. We can say that fan clubs are one of users’ favourite features: during games, almost no users were in chat without a club icon.

• Moderation dashboard: we added a detailed dashboard that allows clients to check everything happening at the moderation level in chats and follow monthly moderation metrics. It distinguishes moderation on all four levels and shows what happened on each: how many users started a report and how many sent it, the main reasons the AI system hides messages automatically, and more.
• Simplified interface: users can choose between a regular and simplified chat interface. When activated, they can switch modes and see the chat like on Twitch.
• Promo code detection tool: if you allow users to share and exchange promo codes, you can activate a tool for this. When activated, promo codes are highlighted in chat and can be activated through an embedded link.
• Support bots: we’ve launched a beta version of the support bot for the listed clients. This bot can assist users in chats and resolve questions based on the knowledge base provided by a client.
• AI-generated polls: polls generated automatically based on updates in specific sports events keep users engaged in chats throughout the game. The feature is launched in a beta version.

New product—standalone AI sports assistant

In June, we launched our AI sports assistant as a new standalone product. If platforms are not ready for internal community building or already have a social layer, they can still launch our AI sports assistant and retain sports fans on their services. Visit the AI sports assistant page or read about it in media.

Next steps​

In September, we will launch the social profile. Social power will help you grow metrics more than ever, and your users will stay on your platform longer than on social media. Follow the updates!

On 1 September, we launch our pro bono program Watchers for Impact. If you run a non-profit project or uniting initiative, apply! Every month, we choose one project to give them the opportunity to use our services for 12 months for free. Explore and apply!

SBC Lisbon

SBC Summit in Lisbon is our next destination. If you will be there too, connect with us and book a meeting!