In December 2014, Zero Digital Sports (then Zero Digital Media) was formed with the idea being an independent voice in the Australian sporting media landscape, with the birth of Zero Hanger.
The creation of Zero Hanger came following the earlier successful launch of Zero Tackle for Australia's rugby league audience.
Ten years later, Zero Hanger sits as the largest independent AFL website on the internet, while Zero Tackle does the same in the NRL space, with our editorial and production teams serving content to over two million Australians every month, and our website viewed up to ten million times per month in-season.
2024 has been another record-breaking year across Zero Digital Sports, with AFL fans once again making the trade period and AFL draft our biggest months of the year.
The Zero Digital story comes from an incredibly small beginning, and, while it's a story every employee who has been through the doors has heard, it's not one that's been told publically all that much.
Before Zero Hanger, Zero Tackle started as a simple spreadsheet to track NRL player movements and contracts.
Founder Matt Clements, who ran the spreadsheet for a group of friends, quickly realised that this solution wasn't going to cut the mustard, so, with his digital (web and app) development background, in 2010 he created zerotackle.com.
A fledging audience was enough to see Interplay Media join as an early commercial partner and quickly become invaluable in monetizing the rugby league content. Zero Digital Sports was then officially formed late in 2014 with the launch of Zero Hanger.
Over the last decade, Zero Digital Sports has experienced plenty of highs and lows, but given that all our websites (up to 18 at one stage) were operated out of a small Melbourne-based office with a single editor for the first six years of its existence, the company trod water at the best of times.
2020 saw the COVID pandemic, and while the rest of the media shrunk in size, Zero Digital Sports made aggressive steps to scale up. Nick Splitter was brought on as the general manager of the publishing business, and the reigns of Zero Hanger were handed over to Mitch Keating, when in the same year, the decision was made to split our editorial teams, allowing our Melbourne-based team to work almost exclusively on Australian rules content, which has taken the website and content to new levels in recent times.
Zero Tackle has gone in the same direction, with the overall audience of Zero Digital Sports being three times what it was at the start of the pandemic.
Our team is bigger than it has ever been, with innovative pushes into video and social media also forming a strong backbone of our on and off-platform strategies.
Our content direction is continually refined, and our editorial standards along with them.
Our annual Season Guides have been a major production project for the publishing team in recent years, and the 2025 AFL Season Guide is already under production, with its expected release date in early February.
We want to continue doing what you expect of Zero Hanger - providing an independent Aussie Rules voice - being fair but critical, and completely free for our audience.
We know there is much we can still improve on, and we still have a long way to go in our journey, There's still a lot to learn, but we also have a lot to be proud of as we celebrate this milestone - a decade of Zero Digital Sports.
