Photos: Compete Releases Top Sports Sites for September 2009

BOSTON, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Compete, a TNS Media company, today released its ranking of top football, college sports and fantasy sports sites for September 2009, which is based on data from the company's integrated online panel of two million U.S.-based internet users. Football Web sites reached more than 16 million unique visitors (UVs) in September 2009, which is a 25.9 percent increase over August 2009. Another high-growth category, college sports sites drew 10.5 million UVs in September 2009, a 74.6 percent month-over-month growth. The category has grown 74 percent since 2008.

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"It's clear that sports fans are loyal to their teams online and off. Advertisers who spend millions of dollars to stay top of mind with sports fans can target leading team sites during the season and follow fans to adjacent sports-related Web sites such as fantasy football," said Cynthia Stephens, director of marketing at Compete.

In conjunction with the beginning of football season, fantasy sports site fantasysports.yahoo.com attracted 6.8 million unique visitors in September 2009, which is ten percent more than the same month last year. Games.espn.go.com (5.2 million UVs) and football.cbssports.com (2.6 million UVs) also gained traction with fantasy sports fans during September. For further analysis of Web traffic to fantasy sports sites, please read, "Fantasy Sports Potpourri... Part 1."

NFL Rules the Web

Compared to last year's season, online football traffic is up 15.4 percent. The Dallas Cowboys (1.3 million UVs), Pittsburgh Steelers (933,990 UVs) and New England Patriots (843,864 UVs) lead the league in online traffic. Several sites (including amazon.com, fansedge.com, stubhub.com and footballfanatics.com) are also capitalizing on the Dallas Cowboys' popularity with one third to two thirds of their search referral share generated by paid clickthroughs from the search term "Dallas Cowboys."

For more on how football season impacts online marketing spend, read Compete's August blog post, "August Data is Live: Summer's Out & Football Season Is In."

College Students Flock to Sports Sites

The NCAA's ncaa.com (580,077 UVs) and ncaa.org (434,034 UVs) attracted the most visitors in the college sports category in September 2009. Even with the beginning of a new semester, popular sports team sites from the University of Florida (gatorzone.com, 407,704 UVs) and University of Michigan (mgoblue.com, 395,193 UVs) attracted more visitors than their University home pages. UFL.edu saw 177,710 UVs in September 2009 and UMich.edu counted 338,773 visitors.

Each month, Compete takes a look at the top movers within one of its 225 industry categories. Month-over-month traffic gains for individual Web sites can be a direct result of seasonality and specific marketing or advertising campaigns. In this way, the top-ranked sites become much more than a list, they are an effective way to assess which competitors' strategies are working and why.

About Compete

Compete, a unit of TNS Media, helps the world's top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading marketers such as Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Hyundai Motor America, Upromise, Chrysler, and Verizon Wireless rely on Compete's services to create effective online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete's online behavior database -- the largest in the industry -- makes the Web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people's lives.

Compete was founded in 2000 and is located in Boston, MA, with offices throughout the U.S. For more information about us, please visit http://www.competeinc.com/, or to join the conversation visit http://www.compete.com/.

About TNS Media

Established in more than 30 countries, TNS Media explores all the media -- print, radio, TV, Internet, social media, cinema and outdoors worldwide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and offers a full range of insights, analyses and audience measurement services.

TNS Media combines the deepest expertise in the industry to provide media and marketing intelligence including advertising expenditure monitoring, advertising creation monitoring, audience measurement, market influence analytics, online consumer behavior tracking, news monitoring, sports sponsorship evaluation and more. The TNS Media companies track more than 3 million brands and provide vital market intelligence to 16,000 customers in the world. http://www.tnsmediagroup.com

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About Kantar Group

The Kantar Group is one of the world's largest research, insight and consultancy networks. By uniting the diverse talents of more than 20 specialist companies -- including the recently-acquired TNS -- the group aims to become the pre-eminent provider of compelling and actionable insights for the global business community. Its 26,500 employees work across 80 countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at each and every point of the consumer cycle. The group's services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies. For further information, please visit www.Kantar.com.