Paris Turf Live is the reference horse racing app by Matchem — not a mass-market product, but something rarer: a deeply vertical app with a passionate, expert user base. Like a PMU bar digitized, it’s a place where enthusiasts debate form, swap tips, and live for race day. Paris Turf Live launched an in-app social space that has recorded a 70% revisit rate and an 88% in-app satisfaction score.
20,000+ messages published since launch — by bettors, journalists, and analysts
70% of community visitors returned more than once
1.8x more app sessions for community users vs. non-members
88% satisfaction rate in an in-app satisfaction poll
Zero moderation effort: human-supervised AI handles all content filtering automatically
Paris Turf Live is the flagship app of Matchem, a French horse racing media and data company. It covers the full universe of French turf: race programs, expert predictions, real-time results, replays, and deep statistical analysis across all formats — Tiercé, Quarté, Quinté+. It is the reference tool for a highly specific audience: serious bettors, specialist journalists, regional operators, and lifelong turf enthusiasts, primarily across France and the Francophone world.
This is not a broad consumer app. It is niche, and that is its strength. Paris Turf Live users are not passive content scrollers. The app is the digital equivalent of a tabac-PMU: a place where people with a shared obsession congregate, debate, and collectively try to beat the odds.
For all this expertise, users had no space to share it inside the app. Each bettor consulted their analysis in isolation — no way to signal a last-minute tip or react to a race result. The conversation was happening elsewhere, or not at all. Paris Turf Live knew the community existed. What it needed was a place to live inside the product.
The integration used Octopus Community’s native SDK on both iOS and Android, with both platforms going live simultaneously on September 25, 2025. Total integration time: approximately half a day.
Features deployed:
Coming next: a private group for premium subscribers, giving Paris Turf Live a way to create an exclusive, gated social space for paying users inside the same community infrastructure.
The “bridge post” feature is the architectural heart of how Paris Turf Live uses the community. Each race in the app is linked to its own dedicated discussion thread — one tap from the race page, and the user is in the conversation. 15+ new races happen every day.
Paris Turf Live’s journalists and regional experts publish content and videos directly into the community feed. The editorial team is not here to moderate a user forum — Octopus Community’s AI takes care of that; it is here to actively publish in it. This dual dynamic — expert editorial content alongside user-generated discussion — mirrors the structure of a great media product: the journalists set the agenda, the community responds.
Community engagement did not peak at launch and plateau, it grew. From 30,000 visitors and 300,000 visits in December 2025 to 40,000 visitors and 480,000 visits by February 2026, activity has consistently increased month over month. Contributions grew +40% between December and January alone.
Four months after launch, Paris Turf Live ran a satisfaction poll directly inside the community — asking users, in context, whether they were satisfied with the feature. 89% said yes. Beyond the number, the poll opened a qualitative feedback loop: users shared what they loved, what they wanted next, and how the community fit into their race-day routine. For a product team, this kind of signal — captured in-app, at the moment of use, by the users most engaged with the product — is more actionable than any post-session survey.
Paris Turf Live is in the process of deploying a private community group reserved for its premium subscribers. Within the same community infrastructure, this creates a gated social layer for paying users — a space where the most committed members of the audience can interact separately, and exchange their best betting tips and predictions. This is an example of how an in-app community can serve as a product differentiator and a monetization lever simultaneously.
Paris Turf Live did not need a generic social feature, it needed the specific thing that has made horse racing culture resilient for over a century: a place to gather, argue, share knowledge, and be among people who care as much as you do. That place now exists inside the app — with 88% of users satisfied — and it keeps growing.
How Paris Turf Live turned a niche horse racing audience into an active in-app community — 88% satisfaction, 1.8x more sessions, no moderation effort.
Niche audiences are often more engaged than broad ones — users share a specific passion, have genuine knowledge to exchange, and return with purpose. 70% of community visitors came back more than once. The community is not large by social media standards; it is dense with relevant interaction. In passion-driven verticals, community engagement per user tends to outperform generalist platforms significantly.
You don’t need a massive user base to start. Apps can launch a community with as few as 100–200 DAUs and still see meaningful early activity — some users will contribute from day one. Messages compound over time: what starts as a handful of daily posts grows into a live, active space as the audience increases. Starting early also pays off strategically: if you’re planning MAU growth, launching the community before that growth arrives means new users enter a space that is already alive, not an empty feed.
A bridge post is a community thread attached to a specific piece of content in the app — in this case, a race, as with a product listing in an e-commerce app, for instance. Paris Turf Live added a “Discuss” button to every race page: one tap brings the user to a conversation dedicated to that race, pre-loaded with whatever the community has already posted. This means every piece of editorial content has a social layer. The community isn’t separate from the product — it is embedded in it.
All moderation runs through Octopus Community’s AI moderation engine, with no manual resource from Paris Turf. The system runs automatically, 24/7, supervised by human moderators, across all content types including video. Paris Turf Live launched without a community manager and has continued to operate that way — the moderation infrastructure handles it.
Within days of launch, more than 1,000 messages had been posted, most of them being bridge posts. Friction-free, in-app access drove early adoption. The community hit a natural rhythm quickly — horse racing has a built-in content calendar (races happen every day), which creates consistent reasons to post and return.
Book 30 minutes with us. We’ll show you the SDK running inside an app like yours.
Ready within 24h — we'll send it straight to your inbox.
Sandbox environment, no credit card required.
Your demo API key will be in your inbox
at within 24h.
In the meantime, explore the
developer docs →
