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.

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.

The rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees is certainly one of the oldest and most heated in all of sports. Not only do the two teams fiercely compete on the field, but they also frequently engage in a war of words off the field. The latest illustration that there is no love lost between these two teams were the comments made by Hank Steinbrenner, Senior Vice President of the Yankees and son of the team’s principal owner George Steinbrenner, in a recent interview with the New York Times Play Magazine.

When asked about the Red Sox, Steinbrenner stated: “Red Sox nation? What a bunch of (expletive) that is. That was a creation of the Red Sox and ESPN, which is filled with Red Sox fans. Go anywhere in America and you won’t see Red Sox hats and jackets, you’ll see Yankees hats and jackets. This is a Yankee country. We’re going to put the Yankees back on top and restore the universe to order.” John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, responded by sending Steinbrenner an official membership card for Red Sox Nation.

After reading Steinbrenner’s comments I wondered whether he was right that Yankee nation was larger than Red Sox nation. It didn’t seem efficient to go around the country counting the number of Yankee and Red Sox hats and jackets, so I decided to analyze online consumer behavior to uncover which “nation” is truly dominant. The chart below illustrates the number of monthly unique visitors to each team’s website from March 2007 through February 2008.

A couple of things jump out from this chart.

• First, the unique visitors to each team’s home page are remarkably similar with an average monthly difference in traffic of only 89,000 people.
• Second, the Yankees generated more unique visitors than the Red Sox in nine of the last twelve months (as a Red Sox fan this pains me to admit).
• Third, the post-season results of each team had a direct impact on site traffic. The Red Sox site steadily garnered increased monthly traffic from August to October, as the team went deep into the playoffs culminating with a World Series championship. The Yankees site, in contrast, experienced a downward trend in visitors during the same period, as the NY squad lost in the first round of post season play (much to the despair of all of us up here in Boston).

So what does this all mean to our original question of which “nation” is bigger? It looks to me that the “nations” are approximately the same size, with potentially a slight edge to the Yankees in a world where both teams are performing equally on the field. However, given that the Red Sox have won two World Series rings in the past four years and the Yankees have not won a championship since 2000, we are in the golden age of Red Sox baseball. Thus, at least during the post-season, Red Sox nation is BIGGER than Yankee nation. For better or worse, those pink hats will not go away until the Sox stop winning championships.

Ladies and gentlemen….start your engines. These famous words of racing will kick off the Nascar Sprint Cup Series at the 50th running of the Daytona 500 this Sunday at 2pm EST. 168,000 screaming spectators will emerge from Nascar hibernation, which commenced at the Homestead-Miami Speedway last November, to fill the stands of the 2.5 mile tri-oval race track. With Nascar’s growing popularity, Compete used its panel of 2 million people to gauge fan excitement, and answer some burning questions before the 2008 season begins.

We first rev up the engine with the typical unique visitor increase in January; excitement sets in as February nears. The number of unique visitors to Nascar.com increased 25% month-over-month to 2.2 million visitors. However, what’s more surprising is that visitation was down 14% year-over-year. This means Nascar.com needs to floor it to reach last February’s calendar year high of 5.3 million visitors.

Going into Daytona, we next wanted to determine which driver would sit on the pole position based on the number of visitors viewing driver-specific information on Nascar.com. “Boogity Boogity Boogity…let’s go racing”

• As we work our way around the track, we find 7 cars swappin’ paint in 5.5 to 7 thousand visitor turn. Rubbin’ is racing ya’ll, but keep it clean
• Beginning to pull away from the pack at 8 thousand visitors, Kyle Busch is holding steady in the M&M sponsored Toyota
• Just ahead of Busch, the Chevrolets of Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin (sorry Aric, Mark has seniority) are running strong between the 10 to 16 thousand visitor mark
• Behind our leader, we find Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne working together to track down Tony Stewart’s Home Depot car who is taking the high line in the 27 thousand visitor turn
• And nearly lapping all of the competitors is our leader and pole position winner is Dale Earnhardt, Jr. with a whopping 64,000 visitors

While Jr. is certainly enjoying his lead how are Nascar sponsors performing before spending $550,000 on a 30-second spot for this Sunday’s race? Let’s take a look at which sponsor websites are naturally attracting more Nascar Enthusiasts today.

Using Compete’s Behavior Match, an online media planning tool, we created a custom segment of Nascar Enthusiasts and gathered all the websites they visited in January 2008. We then scored this segment against the total internet browsing population to determine the top-10 major car sponsor sites (think big stickers) that Nascar Enthusiasts visit more often than the average internet browser. As of January, Kasey Kahne’s Dodge Budweiser sits atop the sponsor leader board – read as Nascar Enthusiasts are 7 times more likely to visit Budweiser.com.

We’ve dropped the green and we know which drivers and sponsors are getting initial traction. But Nascar is a long season and anything can happen - we’ll have to keep an eye out to see who takes the checkered…

I was recently asked for some follow up analysis to a previous post I did last December. In a post about Tabloid Fantasy Leagues I provided a graph depicting traffic to ESPN.com, Sportsline.com, and Yahoo.com for traditional fantasy sports content. As a result I did an analysis for the same sites spanning November ‘06 to November ‘07.

I quickly noticed some interesting general market trends. First, traffic to these Fantasy Sports sites is growing pretty rapidly; 14.5% since November ’06. Additionally, as you can pretty obviously see the two most popular fantasy sports are clearly football and college basketball during March Madness.

But in addition to these general trends I also found some more competitive stats. Yahoo! dominates the marketplace and the gap has widened in the past year. 57% of traffic to the three sites over the last year was to Yahoo!, a percentage that was pretty consistent month to month, except for March. Additionally, the difference in traffic between Yahoo! and its biggest competitor grew 7.5% over last year, while Yahoo!’s overall traffic grew 15.6%. Not only does Yahoo! dominate the fantasy sports market in general, but it controls the biggest single sport: football. While I personally am a big fan of Sportsline, I seem to be in the minority on this one, as Sportsline’s traffic actually declined over the last year. Sportsline’s lost its #2 market position as it was overtaken by ESPN, whose fantasy traffic grew 23%.

Clearly the fantasy sports market continues to thrive. Yahoo! is the clear #1 fantasy sports site and it continues to grow and expand its lead. ESPN and Sportsline only total around 1/3 of the market and have a long way to go if they are going to catch Yahoo! any time soon. The fantasy football season is coming to a close and the next big sport is college basketball in March. We’ll see if they are able to close the gap….

I have to start this post with a shout-out to the Boston Red Sox, the 2007 World Series Champions. As a Bostonian myself and the sister and sister-in-law of Denverites, this year’s World Series was the center of a pretty heated family feud. I am glad to report that the better team came out victorious.

Like nearly every other Denverite, my siblings were hoping to score coveted tickets to one of the World Series game played at Coors Field. As the dutiful sister I am, I (and everyone else in the world) attempted to log on to coloradorockies.com on Monday, October 22 as soon as tickets were released. Despite my hour long efforts, I was unable to connect to the Rockies’ servers. I am sure I looked something like the frustrated fan to the right.

Not surprisingly, the Rockies released a statement later that day indicating sales were suspended due to a system crash that prevented the site pages from loading. The FBI is currently looking into allegations that system failure was actually a result of an “external, malicious attack” on the servers. Despite this set back, they set up shop again the next day and successfully sold all of the remaining tickets within 2 ½ hours. I was still unable to connect to the Rockies’ server the next day, but apparently thousands of other people were.

So what kind of traffic was necessary to take down the Rockies sales site? I examined traffic to colorado.rockies.mlb.com as well as the Californian based evenue.net, the ticketing web site used for sale transactions.

To put the level of traffic to the Rockies’ site on October 22 into perspective, I looked at total traffic to mlb.com as well as the subdomains traffic for the 4 ALCS and NLCS teams. The above graphs show the share of page views and time spent for these 5 segments. For both these metrics, the Rockies’ site contributed about half the total daily traffic to mlb.com.

While the Rockies represented a substantial portion of the mlb.com pie through the playoffs, the traffic to their site on October 22 and 23 was exceedingly high. The following graph shows the Rockies’ daily share of mlb.com traffic for the entire post session.

There is no question that millions, of people were trying to buy Rockies tickets on line. So how did that translate into traffic for evenue.net? Here is a similar time series of metrics for the evenue.net’s daily share of total internet traffic for the month of October.

Notice the large jump in traffic on the 22nd followed by the even larger jump on the 23rd when fans were actually successful in connecting with the web server. While I am not an FBI agent, nor do I play one on TV, it is suspicious that the evenue.net servers would be able to process the large volume of hits on the 23rd, but not the smaller volume the day before. It is also interesting to note that since the Compete panel is comprised of consumers’ clicks and does not include spider or bot activity, we did not pick up the 8.5 million reported hits on October 22. Conclusive evidence of an “external, malicious attack”? I think not. Food for thought? Definitely.