With the start of the NFL season last Thursday, football fever has taken off. The buzz has carried over to the internet, where the sports blogosphere has frantically covered stories on and off the gridiron. There are a myriad of sites which report on football, and Chitika Insights wanted to find out which ones reach the largest audience.
Insights observed a sample of millions of impressions from our servers over the first weekend of the season. We looked at a variety of sites like ESPN, NFL.com, CBS, Fox Sports, and others. We then determined the overall traffic share among these major sources.
The info graphic illustrates the share of traffic to the major NFL news sources. National Football League’s official website received more than three times as many visitors than ESPN’s or FOX Sports’ NFL page. ESPN’s NFL branch was the runner-up, representing 20% of traffic among the selected sites. Fox Sports finished third in our study with a 6% traffic share. Although CBS was one of the chosen sites, its traffic share was so small (well under 1%) in comparison that we could not visibly show it in the info graphic.
The respective NFL pages for FOX Sports saw their traffic peak for the weekend on Sunday whereas ESPN and NFL saw the peak traffic through Thursday and Friday.
The magnitude of NFL.com’s lead over ESPN and FOX Sports is surprising given the variety of coverage on the latter websites. This statistic indicates that fans tend to get their news from a football only source, rather than a site that covers a broad range like ESPN.
Perhaps, one reason for NFL.com’s dominance is that the traffic is from fans craving football exclusively. On the other end, visits to sites like ESPN could be less focused, perhaps as a result of clicking on links via another page. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s this: Football followers are a diehard bunch.
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