There are more sports television channels than ever, and new sports websites popping up every day, but ESPN is the self-declared “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” So just how accurate is that tagline online?

While consistently being the leader throughout height the baseball and football seasons, it seems that the slow sports months early in the year hit ESPN harder than both Yahoo! Sports and Sports Illustrated, which actually grew significantly despite relatively little sports news in the past two months.

I recently joined FanIQ.com, an interactive sports site that starts the sign-up process with a list of statements which users agree or disagree with. One of the first statements was, “ESPN is biased towards certain teams.” With this being such a prominent question and sites like deadspin.com regularly taking aim at “the worldwide leader,” it seems like there is a rising tide against ESPN.

Although Deadspin is part of the popular media and pop culture Gawker network of blogs, it doesn’t have the marketing power of ESPN or Yahoo! to drive UVs, so engagement may be a more even playing field.

• Deadspin and ESPN have been relatively similar in terms of average stay over the past year, but Yahoo! Sports nearly doubles them both, with an average stay hovering around 8 minutes.
• Even though Deadspin readers may not like ESPN, most still aren’t avoiding it – 53% of Deadspin visitors also visited ESPN in February, while only 34% went to Yahoo! Sports. 26% of users went to both ESPN and Yahoo! Sports.
• ESPN readers come back to the site more regularly, with an average of 10.8 monthly visits per unique visitor over last year, as compared to 4.9 for Yahoo! Sports.

We’ll have to check back in as winter sports playoffs and the baseball season start, but there just might be a new name atop the leader board in online sports.

The first of the baby boomers (born 1946-1964) registered for Social Security in October 2007. Over the next two decades, the boomers will retire, and the fight is on for their retirement savings. Financial Services researcher Cerulli Associates projects new IRA rollover contributions will increase from about $300M per year now to over $400M per year in 2012.

Over the coming decade or two, there will be trillions of potential rollover dollars in play for the investment industry. Employees hold almost $7 trillion in 401k, 403b, private pensions, and other employer-sponsored retirement accounts. Boomers’ money in these plans has to roll somewhere as the boomers retire and leave the labor force.

Companies offering IRAs, including investment firms, banks, and insurers, will rake in new accounts and assets from the flood of rollover money. The battle for share of online rollover dollars is up-for-grabs.

Table 1 shows the top sites receiving referrals from key search terms like “401k rollover,” “rollover IRA,” and “IRA rollover.”

Two key takeaways from these data:

• Informational sites dominate. Consumers are seeking help in understanding their options from sites with strong investment content, including investopedia.com and about.com.
• Only 3 financial services firms – T. Rowe Price, Bank of America, and Fidelity Investments – are ranked among the top 10 for any of the search terms (we can add TD Ameritrade to the list if we expand the search terms to include “IRA” without the term “rollover”).
  • The implication is that investment providers’ paid search campaigns are not particularly effective at driving site traffic.

In terms of assets, Fidelity is the current leader in the IRA space with $539B; Charles Schwab and Wachovia are distant runner-ups. Schwab is on the radar for online referrals, showing up in the top 20 for all the search terms above. Wachovia, however, appears to be bypassing online IRA advertising entirely – likely a strategic move consistent with their model.

I would hypothesize that scalability is going to be the biggest obstacle for investment providers as millions of boomers move out of the workforce. The online channel is central to growing a scalable retirement business and these preliminary data suggest a tremendous opportunity for the first investment provider who develops an effective and efficient online go-to-market strategy.

How green are you? My personal answer to that question is, not very. I took the “Green IQ” test on greeniq.com and scored 23 out of 100. I guess simply changing to energy efficient light bulbs and appliances are considered baby steps. I really need to start leaving my V8 in the garage and start walking or pedaling to the grocery story with my eco-friendly reusable grocery bags in tow…or….perhaps I could consider one of the many new hybrids several manufacturers have made available to ease my “not-so-green” mind.

Import manufacturers made it possible for consumers to purchase their green auto as early as 2000 – it has taken a bit longer for the domestics to catch up, but they are here and they include Large Pickups and Full-Size SUV’s. The question is, are they succeeding at drawing environmentally conscious consumers to their websites? We took a look at the 7.6 million visitors in the month of January that we categorize as “Environmentally Conscious” to see which brand websites they were most likely to visit and here is what we found.

On average (among brands shown below), each of the brand sites only had 97,000 consumers among the 7.6 million actually visit in January. If you are looking for a rich concentration of these environmentally conscious consumers among those brands, Saturn wins. You are 2.5 times more likely to see a green consumer on Saturn.com as you are the internet in general. However, if you measure success based on the “number” of unique green consumers that visit a brand website – Honda takes the prize. In January, among the 7.6 million consumers, 238,000 of them also visited Honda.com. Falling short among the competition was Chrysler, Nissan and Dodge – coincidentally newcomers to the hybrid arena.

So what does the reverse look like? Which environmentally conscious websites are automotive prospects most likely to visit?

One site stands out among all brand browsers: fueleconomy.gov, where consumers can coincidentally get the entire list of available hybrid vehicles by manufacturer and determine if there is a tax credit available should you make the investment.

Browsers from the majority of brands visit hybridcars.com – Toyota leads the pack for this particular website. GMC browsers are more likely to be found visiting treehugger.com; Chrysler browsers, though few in number that actually visit an environmentally conscious website, will more likely be found on motherearthnews.com.

Overall, automotive browsers do not generally visit Environmentally Conscious websites – out of the 106 tracked by Compete, browsers of the brands shown above visit an average of only 7 sites. I, with my poor Green IQ score of 23, have visited none of these sites… until now. As car manufacturers offer more choices among vehicles that have a hybrid option beyond that of compact or mid-size cars, perhaps more consumers will jump on the green bandwagon. Time will certainly tell.

Boost announced last week that it will begin its first-ever partner-sponsored advertising campaign targeted at its customers. Mobile web users will see ads for the new Keanu Reeves movie “Street Kings” or for the 2009 Acura TSX.

At first glance, these connections make sense; Boost markets exclusively to a segment of youth-oriented, urban and multicultural consumers. So of course this particular segment would be interested in things… well, urban and youth. Street Kings, about an LAPD cop who must question his loyalties, fits that description. So does the Acura TSX – a favorite among street racing enthusiasts. But these consumers have interests outside this one categorization and Boost is smart to look for less obvious partnerships there.

I was curious about the other interests of Boost’s customer base so I checked their online behavior during February using Behavior Match. As a reminder, Behavior Match indexes all the sites on the web for a certain segment (in this case: Boost customers) against the general Internet population. Any index over 100 means that Boost customers are more likely to visit that site than the average Internet user.

From this exercise I found a few other companies and websites Boost might want to think about partnering with (or competing against in once instance). What do you think?

• Starwoodhotels.com (2.9X more likely to visit)
• Boost’s index was 25% greater than the nearest carrier
• Nike.com (2.8X more likely to visit)
• Sneakers=urban youth, so this isn’t that shocking. But besides T-Mobile (275) no other carrier was within 50 index points
• Imikimi.com (9.7X more likely to visit)
• Imikimi.com provides free MySpace layouts & graphics so again, it fits with the urban youth segment. But Boost customers are almost 10X more likely to visit imikimi.com than the average user! And the index was more than twice that of any other carrier
• Virginmobileusa.com (5.7X more likely to visit)
• There’s a lot of cross-shopping among carriers, and Virgin Mobile stood out from the pack. Almost twice as many Boost customers visit Virgin’s site as they do the next leading competitive website, TracFone.com. Obviously Boost wouldn’t be partnering with VMU in this case, but Boost may want to keep this in mind when considering competitive positioning

The Writers’ Strike may have put a damper on online episodes of America’s favorite TV shows, but it certainly didn’t hold back the country from checking out video coverage of the primary election during the Super Duper Tuesday month of February.

While traffic to online TV episodes and related video was essentially flat at the major portals in February due to a lack of fresh TV content and news, unique viewers at news and politics sites like CNN and MSNBC took a sharp increase from the historic Super Tuesday. On balance, the Top 10 competitors had 5.3% average growth.

The exception was AOL, which just started streaming episodes from all 4 broadcast networks on February 14th. Unique video viewers at AOL were up 19.7% versus the prior month.

Video viewers at Time Warner’s CNN grew 16% while MSNBC enjoyed a 22% increase as visitors tuned in to catch the latest on the hotly contested presidential primaries. (MSNBC is a 50/50 joint venture between NBC and MSN, with traffic attributed accordingly.)

Meanwhile some online video startups were nipping at the heels of the Top 10. There’s been phenomenal growth of video on the web over the past year. Here is just a sampling of the Fastest Movers, ranked by percentage growth in February of this year vs. 2007.*

• GodTube.com tops the list, with supernatural growth since launch in Spring of 2007.
• VBS.tv, Jack9.com, Current.com and Rocketboom.com are sources of originally produced content. These so-called “broadband studios” are producing innovative and, in some cases, exclusive content that has captured loyal followings.
• ExpertVillage.com, VideoJug.com and Instructables.com are geared around instructional videos. They are quickly creating a treasure trove of content and communities around the frequently occurring “how-to ________” search query.
• Veoh is the only site to make it into both the Fastest Growing Sites and Top Video Competitors.

*Note that sites launched after February, 2007 (for example, funnyordie.com and 5min.com) were not considered in this analysis.

Did anyone notice their internet connection slowing to a crawl around noon on Thursday? I have to confess that I wasn’t in the office, as I headed to slightly more lively locales to take in the games. Several friends, who weren’t fortunate enough to be able to get out of the office, reported that it was taking an annoyingly long time for pages to load, starting right when the games started.

Attention to ncaasports.com has been virtually non-existent over the past 30 days (and even longer), but with streaming coverage of all the NCAA tournament games, they saw a huge spike on Thursday. And that slight bump on March 16th? That’s when the brackets were announced.

Is the ability to actually watch the games the only reason people visit NCAA Sports in March, instead of other sports news sites?

Although March numbers were down slightly last year from ’06, no other time of the year, not even college football bowl season, comes close to producing the kind of traffic that ncaasports.com sees from the basketball tournament. It looks like fans are just here to watch the games, and that they may prefer other sources for college sports news in general. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about streaming other sports too.