Who is Winning the Intense Battle Between the Five Major Sports Websites?*
Uncategorized June 20th. 2007, 5:01pm
Our items the last two days about JA Adande passing on Sports Illustrated to write for ESPN.com led to a flurry of media insiders who felt compelled to correct some of our talk about just which sports websites are dominating the web. (The horse photo may seem silly now - but be patient, grasshopper.)
We usually declare ESPN the most popular sports website, and we like to group the rest of the lot - Sportsline, Fox, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated - as slugging it out for second. What we don’t have access to are Comscore numbers, which offer factual proof as to who really is winning the battle (Comscore is just one way to figure it out; just as bloggers gauge readers based on sitemeter or google analytics). There was a minor uproar in February when ESPN.com slipped to second place behind Fox Sports … after the jump, a tipster passes along May’s eye-popping numbers:
Our tipster writers:
“Any suggestion that the fight behind ESPN is between Fox, Yahoo, Sportsline and SI is a joke. There are three big sites — ESPN, Yahoo and Fox — and then everyone else. It’s not close. Sportsline and SI are nowhere in the mix, just mismanaged brand names with no readers … No newspaper can even begin to compare. Slowly but surely the leagues and teams are beginning to understand this, although the old school hold outs remain.
Here are the May comscore numbers:
Unique Users (000) May 2007
Yahoo! Sports: 15,061
Fox Sports: 14,474
Espn.com: 12,713
* [Update: A few folks with access to comscore note that AOL Sports had 7,100 unique users in May]
Sports Illustrated: 4,945
Sportsline: 3,803
Ok, it’s us again. We’re pretty speechless right now, and surely you’ve got thoughts. So let’s hear ‘em.
39 Responses to “Who is Winning the Intense Battle Between the Five Major Sports Websites?*”
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June 20th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
::Obligatory diffusion of ComScore’s legitimacy::
June 20th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Where is AOL?
June 20th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
One reason why Yahoo is winning this battle: fantasy sports.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I wonder how many fantasy league users Yahoo has compared to ESPN.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
In terms of interface, features, and all of that type of stuff, I much prefer Yahoo over ESPN’s overindulgent, slow, bogged down site. Yahoo is straightforward, easy to use, quick, and high on features and content. The only thing I come to ESPN for is Bill Simmons, and the occasional check for newsbreaks.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Fox has the MSN network, ESPN is ESPN and Yahoo is alot of people’s homepage and has the Fantasy sports….AOL numbers have to be doing better and imagine if Google has a good sports and news page
June 20th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Is this really surprising? I never go to SI for anything and only to Sportsline because my fantasy football league is through them. Yahoo is usually the first place I go if I just want to check scores. I feel obligated to check ESPN a couple times a day, but damnit I hate that video. Never been to Fox Sports web site…maybe I should give it a try.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
“One reason why Yahoo is winning this battle: fantasy sports.”
Good call. Does someone logging into his Fantasy Football league count as actually visiting Yahoo Sports? I guess it would.
I don’t recall hearing of anyone going to foxsports.com. No clue what they have. AOL Sports is pretty much a hobjob of links to a few other sports sites and newspapers.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Nothing compelling to say, other than that the next time a pop-up video bombards me on the ESPN site, I’m hitting my monitor with a sledgehammer.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Interesting. I really wonder where AOL is, though.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
The scores and stats on Yahoo are the easiest to read. It has the best fantasy games. And no ads come across your view or music/video playing (Listen up market research people reading this!) and in general seems to be the ‘cleanest’ site, no bells and whistles. I never go to foxsports and have no idea why they would be so high. Who is going there, what is so compelling about the site?
June 20th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
You mean people actually get there sports news from places other than The Big Lead? I’m confused.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I’m with NastyEmu on the ESPN take. And I, too, prefer Yahoo because you don’t need to jump through 14 different hoops just to get where you want.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I say the same about FoxSports…never even been there, had no clue it was a big site at all. Yahoo! is pretty good, but since I stopped using my email account (and the fantasy leagues) that often I’ve been using ESPN and SI. I feel silly for using SI at all but that was shocking that a website that I’ve never even been to is ahead of a site that I frequent 10 times a day and don’t even like that much.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
SI has nothing on its site worth reading other than MMQB and ESPN half asses so much of their content (those NFL Burning Questions are contemptable) that Yahoo! is number one simply because it doesn’t insult its readers by thinking we won’t notice they’re not doing shit.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I’ve never really seen it talked about, but Yahoo has way more photos available, also.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
foxsports and cbs.sportsline are very good. sportsline gives you the hometown hottie everyday from moaxim. yahoo is good especially for fantasy sports.
fuck espn with their shitty videos that automatically play and fuck the espn insider.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
personally, i find si.com offers far more content than the others, with far better writers. i mean, peter king vs. bill simmons??? that’ an m&m’er bay-bee! the kingmeister, the runaway win-nah.
si.com is my first sports site visit. yahoo.com would be second (very good columnists). espn.com might be third during the college football season. the rest are so lame there’s no reason to go. what does foxsports.com or cbs.sportsline offer? nothing that i’m aware of.
i used to go to espn.com a lot but, like others, got turned off by the schtick and pay-per-read. and i just don’t get bill simmons at all. he’s a three-trick pony (boston sports, nba, gambling) of which none of the three interests me one iota. plus, i think he’s a terrible writer.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
You’re too kind, Jordi. If the light is just right … we may hit 500k uniques this month, which means we may catch Sportsline/SI in the winter of 2014.
But as a point of reference … Deadspin and the marquee blogs under the Gawker umbrellas all are getting between 6-9 million uniques a month
June 20th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I questioned that who’s second claim in the Adande piece too. Trust me, I am not a media insider. haha. People like foxsports. It’s more rock, less crapola. ESPN pisses me off, because they usually blast some loud soundbite that let’s everyone in my office know I am not working. Also, I am happy to support fox as they generally align more with my political views, as opposed to the Disney Corporation — which I hate with a firey passion.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I would imagine FoxSports gets a significant portion of its traffic from the MSN home page portal.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
It would be interesting to see how many unique visitors ESPN.com, Foxsports.com and Yahoo! Sports get that don’t come from some sort of outside link like the MSN homepage or the Yahoo homepage. (Full disclosure: I have no idea how the Comscore stats are compiled, they may already do this for all I know.) As many have mentioned above FoxSports and Yahoo both have a significant advantage by partnering with someone or having a big brother that is very popular/big on the web.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
I read SI.com for specific columns (i.e. King, Mandel, Wahl) but never go there for news or scores..I love the way Yahoo is set up with their scoreboard. You can get all the info you need. On ESPN you cant get anything without clicking on a ton of links..
And I never go to Foxsports.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
ESPN Insider is a huge detractor for me. Screw that noise. I will second that ESPN will be my site of choice for College Football, where they are second to none there, although just about any info on College Football gets me excited.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
That’s good to see. Yahoo is definitely the most user friendly of the major sites. Going to ESPN.com is a chore because your monitor gets logjammed with all types of videos launching - and now Fox is mirroring ESPN in the same regard. I hope Yahoo continues the way they’ve gone about business.
Sportsline is a complete joke and SI’s webpage resembles a college dormroom.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Two things: 1) agree with Sean completely. Just from an ease-of-use stand point Yahoo is head and shoulders about ESPN. and 2) fantasy has to play a huge role in this. It would be interesting, if possible, to see how Yahoo’s fantasy user numbers compare to ESPN’s. I’ve got to think Yahoo blows them out of the water in fantasy alone.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
So how long is Deadspin able to stay “under the radar”. At some point, does Deadspin get gobbled up by a major? To me, the obvious place for Deadspin to go is the NY Times, as they do their best to create a national sports brand. I’m not sure what the gobbling up of major blogs (TrueHoop, most notably) does for this brand of journalism/writing. But I’d like to see somebody take a risk, add some video, maybe tinker with “THE LAST THING I WROTE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING” format. I think the NY Times might be willing to give Deadspin the resources to do something like that. And at what point does Will Leicht start getting some more lucrative offers that hurts the relevancy of Deadspin. I mean, he’s got to have a lot of stuff on his plate right now.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I have access to comscore at work. AOL Sports had 7,094 uniques in May 2007. Obviously, that is in 000’s as the others were.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Can’t say I ever read Fox, like some other people have posted. CNNSI has improved a lot IMO. I read ESPN for Simmons, TrueHoop and their NBA Insider stuff. Yahoo is the only site I use for actually following games…I couldn’t care less about all the glitzy flash-based gametrackers and java garbage ESPN uses (if that’s what it is…).
June 20th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
TBL has contributed to the slight toppling of the four letters from America’s computer screens.
Congrats TBL, and here’s to many more posts about penis pics on camera phones, adulterous text messages from ESPN personalities, and how they slurp the Patriots.
We Love You!!
June 20th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
I made the switch to Yahoo from ESPN about 9 months ago and I’ve gone to ESPN maybe two or three times since.
Fox really has nothing except for Chad Finn’s Nine Innings on Fridays, which is always a great read
June 20th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Nick, can you email me a link to comscore? Or do you have to buy access? Very interested to see those numbers. Either way, email me, please.
Dank - At the risk of speaking out of turn … no chance of Deadspin getting gobbled up. Gawker, defamer, all those guys won’t get gobbled up. Nick Denton is a brilliant man making a lot of money. Look him up - really interesting cat.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
When ESPN sent all the baseball writers to the pay section, they lost me.
Yahoo is my homepage when I log in, and with my personalized scoreboard its a quick read first thing.
June 20th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Just to expand on the fantasy thing helping Yahoo for a second, one of the reasons I began to read yahoo more was because they linked to other articles on their site within their fantasy games. To me, this is how “synergy” is supposed to work. Yahoo has tremendously popular fantasy games and they leverage that to expose people to some of their other, more traditional, sports offerings.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Just a background on MSN’s pull in the fox sports numbers. I work for a Careerbuilder and all of their career traffic goes to us. In a typical month they drive 4-6 million uniques or about 1/5 of our overall monthly numbers. Fox Sports traffic from MSN is more direct so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was around 1/2 of their traffic or more.
IMO I prefer cnnsi for writers, each sport has a great beat guy especially Heymen for baseball and their college football and basketball coverage is better then most.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
It just seems to me that Deadspin is the only voice right now (TBL a close second, of course) out there that would have the kind of credibility to challenge the status quo in the sports media. Bill Simmons has become a brand unto himself, and if he were, for instance, to head to Deadspin, that’s a pretty incredible brand with Leitch and Simmons. This is theoretical, I realize, as Simmons just re-upped with ESPN.
It’s pretty apparent, to me at least, that ESPN’s relationship and their has eroded their credibility in the eyes of a lot of viewers. Especially the savvy ones, the 18-34 bunch. The people that made ESPN attractive to advertisers in the first place.
I gather that Gawker is a beast in the blog world, and clearly Denton has been really successful defining an industry. But what (mini) media mogul wouldn’t be eying a bigger prize? It just seems like there’s a lot to be decided out there on the Internets in sports. How else can you explain the popularity of sites like this and Deadspin? You’ve got brand loyalty, compelling discussions, all kinds of good stuff, and about 1/500000 of the resources. ESPN would kill for this kind of participation and readership, they just can’t get it.
Do you see video/audio and a little more organization in Deadspin’s future?
June 21st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
why is Fox Sports News so popular? What am I missing? I hate supporting that Biased Pig Murdoch in anything.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Where are all the blogs?
Deadspin, KSK, WithLeather, TBL…
Does anyone know their comscore or NNR numbers for monthly uniques?
June 26th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Yahoo is the best for scores. Its easy to get to and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of nonsense.
ESPN.com = sensory overload