It's obvious this year that cricket is being taken more seriously than ever by the publishers.
It makes sense, it is a good match for online as most games are played whilst people are at work - so many rely on digital channels to get the info on how much Australia is smacking the opposition by. ;)
So who is winning the war?
Well - it's tough to work out ... Neilsen Market Intelligence only allows you to split sites by category (ie sport) ... below are figures for December 07
Rank Site Domestic UBs per month (UBs per day)
1. Foxsports 887,203 (68,483)
2. WWOS ninemsn 729,709 (42,991)
3. smh.com.au/sport 669,448 (47,765)
3. smh.com.au/sport 669,448 (47,765)
4. Baggy Green 478,348 (46,005)
5. The Age Sport 413,084 (28,413)
6. Cricket.com.au 275,216 (16,984)
7. Sportal 132,203 (9,987)
Now just to clarify, the only pure cricket plays here are baggy green and cricket.com.au. It's interesting baggy green is still beating cricket.com.au given most of the in game cues are pushing to cricket.com.au. Foxsports includes not only their cricket coverage, but also all their other coverage AND stickcricket.com.au ... so it is hard to grasp which traffic is purely for cricket information. SMH and The Age are strong and one could hypothesise that most of their December traffic is Cricket related ... Sportal rounds things off at 132,203.
It's safe to say Baggy Green has benefited from being an early mover within this category - great figures for 07/08 season with definitely reduced TV pushes. (disclaimer: MI represents the interests of one Baggy Green advertising sponsor).
Another piece of data worth looking at is the % of overseas visitors on the main sites - considering the visiting Indian and Sri Lankan cricket teams
Foxsports - 22% of total traffic is intl
Cricket.com.au - 18% of total traffic is intl
Baggy Green - 4.5% of total traffic is intl
SMH/Sport - 36% of total traffic is intl
The Age/Sport - 33% of total traffic is intl
Fairfax properties have the highest % of intl visitors - however these properties IP target their display advertising to AU eyeballs only. Interestingly baggy green has a very low % of overseas visitors. One would hope the advertisers on Fox Sports and cricket.com.au are utilising IP targeting to make sure some of their ads aren't wasted on intl eyeballs.
A quick check of Google shows none of the above are presently (13/1/08) undertaking any SEM. The only properties using SEM are Yahoo!7, The Roar .com.au and Windows Live Search.
2 comments:
Wow... I see it, but can't believe it ... an Interaction blog! Nice work gents (and nice work on the name problem "M interaction" .. tidy circumvention there indeed).
A few of these are just brands sharing the same content and some is about live scoreboards in the corner of the screen on work desktops.
The baggygreen(really cricinfo) and cricket.com.au is the interesting one as goes to the proposition of organisations who produce content - (ACB in this case)trying to both sell their content and the audience as well. Seems to have been a very australian approach - (AFL, NRL etc).
Post a Comment