You guys seems to love data like this so I thought I'd share it with you in greater detail than we have before. I used the Game of Thrones graphic because the show will return on April 12th and I had no idea what other graphic to use for this story.
According to comScore there was a total audience of 189 million sports readers in December of 2014.
(Note, it's very popular to roll up tons of sites under one partnership now. So I've broken out some of the individual sites that are included under the banners as best I can. I haven't put in all the sites, just ones I think you guys might be interested in seeing.)
So which sites were the most read? Here we go:
1. ESPN 88.3 million
ESPN doesn't break out a site like Grantland.com or Fivethirtyeight.com. Just as Fox doesn't break out a site like Outkick. FYI, Outkick typically run between 1 and 2 million uniques a month on our internal numbers.
2. Yahoo/NBC 66.5 million
a. Yahoo 35.7 million
b. NBC Sports 21.3 million
c. Fan Duel 5.1 million
d. Rivals 3.1 million
3. NFL.com and team sites 57.7 million
Individual team sites are not broken out.
4. Fox Sports and Sporting News 56.65 million
a. YardBarker Network 23.8 million
b. FoxSports.com 16.1 million
c. SportingNews.com 7.2 million
d. Saturday Down South 3.9 million
e. Busted Coverage 766k
f. Awful Announcing 635k
5. CBS Sports 51.8 million
a. CBSSports.com 27 million
b. 247 Sports 14.3 million
c. Top 20 team sites managed by CBS Sports
a. Ohio State 882k
b. Michigan 642k
c. Alabama 635k
d. Kentucky 623k
e. Wisconsin 576k
f. BigTen.Org 499
g. Penn State 494k
h. Notre Dame 468k
i. Oklahoma 407k
j. Georgia 387k
k. Tennessee 372k
l. Michigan State 354k
m. Auburn 345k
n. Minnesota 310k
o. UConn 293k
p. Iowa 293k
q. Southern Cal 288k
r. Illinois 252k
s. South Carolina 243k
t. Oregon State 234k
6. Bleacher Report 51.3 million
a. BleacherReport.com 35.8 million
b. NBA and team sites 17.6 million
c. NCAA.com 4.4 million
d. Nascar 2.4 million
e. PGA.com 731k
7. USA Today Sports Media Group 40.5 million
a. USA Today Sports 22.8 million
b. Local paper sports sections 10.8 million
i. Detroit Free Press 3.4 million
ii. IndyStar 1.2 million
iii. Tennessean 549k
c. For the Win 6.7 million
d. The Big Lead 2.97 million
e. College team sites
i. Nebraska Athletics 668k
ii. Oregon 651k
iii. North Carolina 478k
iiii. Duke 473k
v. Florida State 411k
vi. Washington 270k
vii. Maryland 256k
viii. UCLA 237k
8. SB Nation sites 36.2 million
SBNation doesn't break up the traffic for their hundreds of sites.
9. Sports Illustrated 20.5 million
a. SI.com 13.0 million
10. MLB 15.5 million
MLB doesn't break up traffic for the team sites.
11. Deadspin 14.4 million
12. MSN Sports 14.3 million
13. Cinesport 10.6 million
14. NHL sites 10.3 million
15. HuffPost Sports 8.9 million
...
Pretty fascinating data in here.
Five quick thoughts:
1. How about Deadspin having more readers than SI.com?
2. For the Win is a monster site for USA Today, nice work by Jamie Mottram there.
3. The YardBarker Network is pretty massive, much bigger than FoxSports.com or SportingNews.com.
4. Look out for 247Sports.com. In addition to the subscriber business, Shannon Terry's team is turning into a massive audience as well.
5. I have no idea what Cinesport is.
