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Compete Releases Top Sports Sites for September 2009
NFL Rules the Web, College Students More Interested in Sports Teams than Education Sites
BOSTON – (October 30, 2009) – Compete, a TNS Media company,today released its ranking of top football, college sports and fantasy sports sites for September 2009, which is based on data from the company’s integrated online panel of two million US-based internet users. Football Web sites reached more than 16 million unique visitors (UVs) in September 2009, which is a 25.9 percent increase over August 2009. Another high-growth category, college sports sites drew 10.5 million UVs in September 2009, a 74.6 percent month-over-month growth. The category has grown 74 percent since 2008.
“It’s clear
that sports fans are loyal to their teams online and off.
Advertisers who spend millions of dollars to stay top of mind with
sports fans can target leading team sites during the season and follow
fans to adjacent sports-related Web sites such as fantasy
football,” said Cynthia Stephens, director of marketing at
Compete.
In conjunction with the beginning of football season, fantasy sports
site fantasysports.yahoo.com attracted 6.8 million unique visitors in
September 2009, which is ten percent more than the same month last
year. Games.espn.go.com (5.2 million UVs) and
football.cbssports.com (2.6 million UVs) also gained traction with
fantasy sports fans during September. For further
analysis of Web traffic to fantasy sports sites, please read,
“Fantasy
Sports Potpourri… Part 1.”
NFL Rules the Web
Compared
to last year’s season, online football traffic is up 15.4
percent. The Dallas Cowboys (1.3 million UVs), Pittsburgh
Steelers (933,990 UVs) and New England Patriots (843,864 UVs) lead the
league in online traffic. Several sites (including
amazon.com, fansedge.com, stubhub.com and footfallfanatics.com) are
also capitalizing on the Dallas Cowboys’ popularity with one
third to two thirds of their search referral share generated by paid
clickthroughs from the search term “Dallas
Cowboys.”
For more on how football season impacts online marketing spend, read
Compete’s August blog post, “August
Data is Live: Summer’s Out & Football Season Is In.”
College Students Flock to Sports Sites
The
NCAA’s ncaa.com (580,077 UVs) and ncaa.org (434,034 UVs)
attracted the most visitors in the college sports category in September
2009. Even with the beginning of a new semester, popular
sports team sites from the University of Florida (gatorzone.com,
407,704 UVs) and University of Michigan (mgoblue.com, 395,193 UVs)
attracted more visitors than their University home pages.
UFL.edu saw 177,710 UVs in September 2009 and UMich.edu counted 338,773
visitors.
Each month, Compete takes a look at the top movers within one of its
225 industry categories. Month-over-month traffic gains for
individual Web sites can be a direct result of seasonality and specific
marketing or advertising campaigns. In this way, the
top-ranked sites become much more than a list, they are an effective
way to assess which competitors’ strategies are working and
why.
Compete, a unit of TNS Media, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading marketers such as Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Hyundai Motor America, Upromise, Chrysler, and Verizon Wireless rely on Compete's services to create effective online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete’s online behavior database—the largest in the industry—makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives.
Compete was founded in 2000 and
is located in Boston, MA, with offices
throughout the U.S. For more information about us, please
visit http://www.competeinc.com/,
or to join the conversation visit
http://www.compete.com/.
About TNS media
Established in more than 30
countries, TNS Media explores
all the media—print, radio, TV, Internet, social media,
cinema and outdoors worldwide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and
offers a full range of insights, analyses and audience measurement
services.
TNS Media combines the deepest expertise in the industry to provide
media and marketing intelligence including advertising expenditure
monitoring, advertising creation monitoring, audience measurement,
market influence analytics, online consumer behavior tracking, news
monitoring, sports sponsorship evaluation and more. The TNS
Media companies track more than 3 million brands and provide vital
market intelligence to 16,000 customers in the world. http://www.tnsmediagroup.com
About
Kantar Group
The Kantar Group is one of
the world's largest research,
insight and consultancy networks. By uniting the diverse talents of
more than 20 specialist companies – including the
recently-acquired TNS – the group aims to become the
pre-eminent provider of compelling and actionable insights for the
global business community. Its 26,500 employees work across 80
countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy
disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at
each and every point of the consumer cycle. The group’s
services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500
companies. The Kantar Group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of
WPP Group plc. For further information, please visit http://www.kantargroup.com