Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today reported a 26 percent year-over-year increase in unique visitors at work to online sports destinations, growing from 33.4 million unique visitors in Aug. 2007 to 42.3 million unique visitors in Aug. 2008.
The audience analysis and measurement firm said the big climb was driven in large part by the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the kick-off of football season. The latter was made more relevant by surging interest in online fantasy football.
The custom Web property, NBC Olympics, attracted significant traffic at work during the month, reaching 20 percent of the active at work Web population, which is slightly more than 13.8 million unique visitors.
Nielsen said the breadth of Olympics content that NBC provided online contributed to people not only visiting the Web site, but also staying for extended periods of time, with the average visitor spending 57 minutes and seven seconds over the course of the month.
“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,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, media analytics at Nielsen Online, in prepared comments. “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.”
Nielsen claims Yahoo! Sports was the number one online sports destination at work in Aug. 2008, with 18.7 million unique visitors, growing 112 percent year-over-year. Web properties, ESPN and FOX Sports on MSN took the No. 2 and 3 spots, with 11.9 million unique visitors and 7.7 million unique visitors, respectively.
Among the top ten sports sites, Fantasy Sports Ventures Network was the fastest growing, increasing 285 percent from one million unique visitors to 3.9 million in Aug. 2008.
