Friday, April 10, 2009

CBS Sports vs. Fox Sports

CBS recently announced their terrific traffic figures for the March Madness NCAA College Basketball tournament, here. The numbers were impressive:
  • 5.6 million views in the first four days of coverage
  • 60% YOY growth
You can see the Alexa Daily reach for CBS Sports shown in blue on the left.

What CBS neglects to mention is that they are the perennial second in online sports, and that their brief success was followed by a quick return to the status quo.

If you look at the Fox Sports trend line in red you'll see that they enjoy peaks on a regular basis that meet or exceed the brief spike in CBS Sports traffic, and the traffic to foxsports.com is consistently more than double cbssports.com.

What were those two spikes in Fox Sports traffic (in red) on Feb 1 and March 1. Soccer. Who knew?

Kudos to CBS. Those traffic figures are very impressive. Keep it up and you may catch Fox.