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.

Judging by the selection of fantasy football guides at a local bookstore (I found 8 magazines devoted solely to helping you in your draft) and all the spots on television, it seems that fantasy football is bigger than ever. While off-line coverage is a good indication that the game has hit the mainstream, the real scope of fantasy football can be best seen where the game is played – online.

ESPN and Yahoo! dominate the fantasy football world, with Yahoo! being the overall leader with over 135% more session since the beginning of July. The map above shows which geographical areas the traffic is coming from and is relatively in line with the U.S. population density. The ESPN and Yahoo! fantasy football traffic shows a slightly different story when indexed against the state population.

The above map shows the intensity of fantasy football participation on the two major sites by state. For example, North Dakota had the highest intensity with 185,543 sessions from a state population of 635,867 for an intensity measure of 29%. This methodology evens the playing field and eliminates the bias of population density to show the truly impassioned fantasy football states.

• Three states have three professional football teams, yet none of them finished in the top half of the state rankings in terms of intensity. New York was the highest at 29 with, followed by Florida at 38 and California at 45.
• The Colts Super Bowl run last season may have helped increase Indiana’s fantasy football intensity – coming in third behind North Dakota and Delaware.
• Wyoming ranks as the least intense fantasy football state, coming in last with only 3%.

Four of the top ten states do not have an NFL franchise, which helps show just how widespread the popularity of fantasy football has become.

David Beckam’s move to America and Major League Soccer has received both praise and criticism - and then some. It seems like you can’t turn on the tv without seeing Posh and Becks. Critics of soccer in the U.S. are quick to point out that even though there has been overwhelming exposure of one of the world’s most popular couples, only a portion of that has actually been related to soccer. Whether you think the huge contract that the LA Galaxy gave Beckham is worth it or not, there is no doubt that it has put the MLS on many non-soccer fan’s radars, for better or worse.

The move certainly had a lot to do with Beckham’s off-field popularity, but some of his on-field magic could really help the Galaxy, who are one of the worst teams in the league this year – although you wouldn’t know it by looking at traffic to their website.

• Unique visitors to the Galaxy site were up an average of 103% for the first three months of the season – before Beckham ever touched the field.
• With number 23’s debut in July, visitors to the site were more than 400% what they were during the same month last season.
• Over 20,000 unique visitors went to the Beckham-dedicated page on the MLS site in June alone, nearly as many for one player as the Galaxy team page had in June last year.

Traffic to MLSnet.com (can you name another professional sports league whose site url is not the name of their league?) skyrocketed in July as well, although the numbers have not been so consistently positive this season as they have been for the Galaxy.

Although I’m sure Paulo Wanchope and Cuauhtemoc Blanco joining the league raised some interest, it seems that Beckham’s debut in July and the announcement of his signing in the winter drastically spiked traffic - but unique visitors actually dipped in June this year compared to last. So does this mean that the excitement of having the world’s most popular player in the league will wear off like it did after the news of his signing? My guess is no, especially if he is making pin-point crosses into the box and bending in free kicks, but we’ll be sure to look at the traffic again to see just how strong the Becks effect is.

One of the most intense rivalries in sports is between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, and this rivalry goes beyond the field. We all know the Yankees have more World Series championships than the Red Sox, but who is winning the online battle between the two powerhouses? A team’s popularity is crucial; the more people that watch the games and show interest in the team, the more revenue a franchise can generate. To compare the popularity between the two ball clubs, let’s look at the traffic to each team’s official website starting with April 2004.

Key Findings

• If you add the monthly unique visitors since April 2004, Redsox.com narrowly edges out Yankees.com - 25,842,280 to 25,747,282.
• In October 2004, Redsox.com hosted 1.4 million people as the team won its first championship in 86 years.
• Despite having a population that is 1/14th of New York City, Boston fan support is on par with their arch rival’s.

State by State Analysis
With Boston’s population so much smaller and monthly unique visitor counts so high, my first thoughts were that the Red Sox must have a wider national fan base. So I decided to look at this baseball season’s traffic to Redsox.com and Yankees.com state by state.

Yankees.com had more total monthly unique visitors in 39 states this baseball season. The historical data from the previous section shows that playoff time traffic to these two sites can change dramatically, so who knows what this map will look at the end of October. As a Red Sox fan, I hope to see a lot more red.