Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Football Still Rules Online Sports
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Yahoo Sports
Acquiring college sports site Rivals.com gave Yahoo Sports a considerable edge over ESPN.com for online traffic. |
You can call me a backdoor user of
ESPN and a front-door user of
Yahoo Sports. It seems I'm not the only one.
According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, Yahoo Sports is now the most-visited online sports destination with 18.4 million unique visitors in August -- edging out ESPN by about 200,000 unique visitors.
You could call it the old college try. In late June, Yahoo acquired Rivals.com, a network of college and prep sports-related sites for about $100 million. This move obviously made a difference with the start of the college and prep football seasons in late August.
Yahoo pushed its advantage into September (and the start of the professional football season) with nearly 12 million visitors for the week ending Sept. 23.
That's about 3 million more than ESPN.
"There's massive integration throughout our college sites, and our users are clicking over at a pretty nice rate," said Jimmy Pitaro, general manager and vice president of Yahoo Sports, in an Oct. 6 Hollywood Reporter story by Alex Woodson. (Nielson Co. is the parent company of the Hollywood Reporter.)
Yahoo Sports had fewer than 7 million users for the week ending Aug. 5, but nearly 13 million by the week ending Sept. 16 -- when the site's 4 million fantasy football players draft their rosters. "They're an incredibly engaged, passionate and focused sports audience," Pitaro said. "They consume a lot of pages online, and they also interact very nicely with the site, not just on the fantasy products."
The Yahoo Sports strategy makes perfect sense to me. In 1995 (was it THAT long ago?), I was responsible for creating a college sports stringer network for USAToday.com that utilized a correspondent for every Division I college football team and every Division I college basketball conference (men and women). That system is no longer in place, but the importance of college football and basketball as a traffic driver hasn't escaped the current online leader.
As for front doors and back doors, I've written before that while ESPN's site is a sports fan's heaven, it's simply too rich for my tastes. When I access specific ESPN content, it is usually through a tailored SportsFlash newsletter or other alerts I receive. I find the Yahoo Sports interface friendlier and easier -- or least less time-consuming -- to navigate. You can get lost on ESPN, wandering aimlessly from one admittedly wonderful feature to the next. I wish I had the time and the inclination.
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