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| Traffic on sports sites doubles as IPL nears |
| Priyanka Joshi / Mumbai Mar 11, 2010, 00:46 IST |
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Over the last one year, Advait Kulkarni, a self-confessed 34-year-old sports enthusiast, has been glued to the internet at work and home. “I have been increasingly visiting sports sites like ESPN and the sports sections of MSN and Yahoo! to get a ball-by-ball account of cricket and even the hockey matches. Now, with IPL3 almost on us, it is likely that fans like me will try to catch critical matches and individual player’s feats online,” he says.
Kulkarni’s intuition is right. Right from the player auctions in January this year for the third edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL3), internet users aged 15 and above have flocked to online sport sites to track the action. This doubled the number of visitors to sport sites in January this year to 10 million, from five million visitors in the same month last year. The IPL’s third season, which will begin on March 12, is only expected to add more eyeballs.
India, according to data from marketing research agency comScore, had an estimated 37 million active internet users in January — up 15 per cent from 32.5 million last year. Yahoo! Cricket leads the pack among sports sites. With nearly four million visitors in a single month, it has become the most visited sports destination online. ESPN’s Cricinfo is at the second spot with 3.5 million visitors, followed by Sify Sports with more than a million visitors.
Seasonal traffic
Sports traffic is very seasonal, and spikes only when Indian teams are participating. For instance, in January 2009, when India’s engagement with Pakistan was cancelled, it led to a drop in online activity. But in January this year, there was a major tri-series tournament between India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in addition to the IPL3 player auction. This combination, according to industry experts, caused online traffic to skyrocket.
Prashant Mehta, COO of Komli Media that runs the online audience measurement platform Vizisense, points out that the average time spent by a user is about 50 minutes on every visit. Especially on Rediff Sports, which attracted 876,000 unique users a month.
“This can mean big money for advertisers waiting to encash the sports fervour this season,” he claims.
Mehta sees the young age of the average netizen as another positive point. “Nearly 77 per cent of India’s web population is aged under 35 years. Most are skewed towards cricket, sports and online entertainment,” he says.
Tremendous growth
Sports sites, according to comScore, managed to engage audience to record levels. The average sports category visitor spent at least 30 minutes at sports sites, viewed 41 pages of content and visited the category nearly six times in January this year. Mehta adds: “The sports frenzy is set to continue through this month and the online medium is set to be a critical source for fans to access live news feed for various sporting events.”
Concurs Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice-president for the Asia-Pacific region: “The sports category experienced tremendous growth last year as more Indians turned to the internet as their first source of up-to-the-minute news on their favourite teams and players.”
Joe Nguyen, comScore vice-president for South-East Asia, underscores other contributing factors too, including the acceleration in consumption of online media in India, including sports content, due to an increase in visitors and user engagement.
“While loyal fans are increasingly turning to the internet for the latest updates on their favourite teams, they are also benefitting from improvements in the quality of available online content in terms of live scores, commentary and analysis as well as the social networking aspect, such as forums and discussion boards,” he points out.
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