The FIFA World Cup provided Prothom Alo with an opportunity to experiment at scale and across teams, demonstrating what can happen when a major event is treated as a digital product and audience engagement opportunity.
In an INMA social media blog, Prothom Alo social media manager Shiddhartha Das notes that the global content phenomenon created “an extraordinary opportunity” for news media to attract audiences, build engagement, and experiment with new digital experiences.
“Traditionally, sports coverage around a World Cup has followed a familiar formula: match fixtures, live scores, breaking news, team updates, player stories, and post-match reports.
“Prothom Alo used a variety of strategies to engage readers during the World Cup, including creating games and quizzes that kept people active and involved.
With a decision to approach this year’s World Cup differently, instead of asking how they could cover the World Cup, the team asked a more important question: How could we make audiences experience the World Cup through Prothom Alo?
“That change in mindset became the foundation of a content innovation strategy that generated 101 million audience engagements and 2 billion post views throughout the FIFA World Cup 2026 period.”
The achievement was not the result of a single viral story or platform. It was the outcome of a coordinated effort across the product, web, social media, and digital marketing teams, combining journalism, technology, audience engagement, and digital distribution.
The biggest shift was moving beyond traditional news coverage. People already had countless options for finding match scores, fixtures, and breaking sports news. Competing only on the availability of information would not be enough.
“Instead, we focused on creating content experiences that encouraged audiences to participate,” he says. “This involved approaching content from several different creative angles.”
One of the biggest opportunities during a global sporting event is tapping into the passion and knowledge of the audience. Football fans don’t just want to consume information. They want to predict, compete, test their knowledge, and share their opinions.
Teams from Prothom Alo – based in Dhaka, Bangladesh – used games and quizzes to transform passive audiences into active participants. Instead of simply publishing a story about a match, the audience could interact with the content, answer questions, and test their football knowledge.
This created a different relationship between the brand and its audience. The audience was no longer just reading the story. They became part of the story. This is particularly important for social media, where interaction is often a stronger indicator of audience connection than simple content consumption.
The World Cup also provided an opportunity to rethink the role of the website. “Rather than treating the website simply as a place to publish articles, the product and web teams developed interactive experiences around the tournament.
The sports widget brought together a host of World Cup-related news, highlights, and activities. “The objective was simple: Make Prothom Alo a destination for everything audiences wanted to know and experience around the World Cup,” he says. Fixtures, match information, statistics, results, and editorial content came together in one digital ecosystem. This product-oriented approach helped bridge the gap between content and utility.”
Scorecards: making live information more engaging
Live scores are one of the most essential elements of sports coverage, but presenting a score is only the starting point. Prothom Alo’s World Cup strategy focused on making score-related content more visually accessible and useful for audiences across digital platforms.
“The live scorecard encouraged readers to check in and engage in social-friendly content.
“For social audiences, especially those on mobile, information needs to be fast, visual, clear, contextual, and shareable. This principle helped transform basic match information into social-friendly content.”
Match statistics: giving audiences more than the score
A score tells audiences what happened. Statistics help explain how it happened.
Goals, possession, shots, player performance, and other match-related data allowed audiences to understand the game beyond the final result. This also created opportunities for social media storytelling. This is where data journalism and social storytelling intersect.
Pre- and post-match analysis: creating a content journey
Another important part of the strategy was expanding coverage beyond the 90 minutes of a match.
The audience journey began before kickoff. Pre- and post-match analysis helped create a continuous content journey around each match. Instead of one match producing one story, a single match could generate an ecosystem of content before, during, and after the game.
The real innovation: one event, multiple content experiences
Perhaps the most important lesson from the World Cup was that content innovation does not necessarily mean inventing a completely new format. It means connecting different formats around a single audience need.
A single match could result in pre-match coverage, predictions, quizzes, live score updates, match statistics, social cards, post-match analysis, data stories, videos, and discussion. This creates a content flywheel. Each piece of content feeds the next experience, allowing audiences to enter the ecosystem from different platforms and different moments.
The FIFA World Cup provided Prothom Alo with an opportunity to experiment at scale. The result —101 million audience engagements and 2 billion post views — shows what can happen when a major editorial event is treated not merely as a coverage assignment, but as a digital product and audience engagement opportunity.
Therefore, the most valuable outcome may not be the numbers themselves. It is the model behind the numbers. This is a model where:
–editorial creates the story;
–product creates the experience;
–data creates the context’
–social creates the conversation;
–marketing creates the reach;
–and, together, they create something more powerful than traditional news coverage: an audience experience.