Interest in the Beijing Summer Olympics and the start of the football season drove a 26 percent boost in August traffic on U.S. sports websites viewed at work, a unit of Nielsen Co said on Thursday.
The number of unique visitors accessing sports websites from their office locations grew to 42.3 million in August, up from 33.4 million last year, according to Nielsen Online.
“With broad interest in the Olympics, and the ramp up of the college and professional football seasons, August was a busy month for online sports fans,” Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said in a statement.
“The Web offered 24/7 access to news, results and video, and fans demonstrated a healthy appetite for information about their favorite athletes and teams,” he added.
NBC Universal’s NBC Olympics website, custom built for the Beijing games, reached 20 percent of the active at work online population, or slightly more than 13.8 million unique visitors, Nielsen said. Those visitors stayed for a long look, spending an average of 57 minutes and 7 seconds at the website.
Yahoo Sports was the No. 1 online sports destination at work with 18.7 million visitors, more than double last year’s numbers, Nielsen said.
Walt Disney Co’s ESPN and FOX Sports on MSN took the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, with 11.9 million and 7.7 million visitors, respectively, Nielsen said.
NBC Universal is the media wing of General Electric Co. Fox is part of News Corp.
Among the top 10 sports sites, No. 9 Fantasy Sports Ventures Network was the fastest growing, up 285 percent to 3.9 million visitors.
“The increasing popularity of fantasy football also helped drive the impressive growth,” Gibbs said. “In many cases, fantasy sports have become more popular than the sports coverage itself.”
Another reason for the strong August numbers was the faster growth rate of women visitors, Nielsen said. The number of unique female visitors rose 37 percent, compared with a 21 percent growth rate among men.
source: reuters.com
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