According to Hitwise, the top 10 sports websites as measured by market share of US visits is as follows:
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the top three are ESPN, Yahoo Sports, and CBSSports. And if you factored in all of the sub-domains, Yahoo would likely win the overall battle. Nielsen also released March 2009 data and shows a slightly different picture:
While the top 3 are the same, the order is slightly different at the top. While ESPN has the largest market share of visits, Yahoo Sports has the largest number of unique users. All three of the top sites saw a significant increase in traffic during March due to the NCAA tournament. That is a common theme across the board for sports oriented properties.
It’s obvious that ESPN and CBSSports depend much more on March Madness to drive traffic with each showing large month-over-month unique user growth of 34% and 70% respectively. CBSSports makes a lot of sense with their focus on streaming live games during the NCAA tournament, but I’m a bit surprised to see the large jump in ESPN traffic. Obviously college basketball “fans” come out of the woodwork once the field of 65 is officially announced. Yahoo on the other hand seems much less dependent on the tournament with growth of only 2% from February to March Mar 2009.
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