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.
Why horse racing was made for community
About Paris Turf Live
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.
Their challenge
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.
How Paris Turf Live launched its in-app community
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:
- Bridge posts — a dedicated discussion thread linked to every race page in the app. Users tap a “Discuss” button on any race and land directly in that race’s community thread. All race discussions are also aggregated inside the relevant topic feed.
- Push notifications
- Video posts — the editorial team publishes video content and race replays directly in the community
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.
What the community made possible
Every race becomes a conversation
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.
The editorial team has a new channel
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.
A community that built itself over time
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.
A direct line to user sentiment
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.
An exclusive space for premium users — in progress
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.
The digital PMU bar — built to last
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.
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