Yahoo Again Tops Latest ComScore Rankings, While ESPN Falls To Third

Yahoo Sports again earned the top spot on comScore's monthly rankings of U.S. online sports destinations, pulling in an audience of 54.96 million unique visitors in January. But the biggest story was the fall of ESPN.com to the third slot, behind FoxSports.com. The shift, ESPN's first month outside the top two positions in more than four years, owes primarily to the loss of Active.com's traffic assignment (5.8 million uniques in January) to the ESPN total. ESPN had been at 43.325 million uniques in December, but has shed the Active.com traffic, and is now focusing on its core and owned properties such as the main ESPN.com site, Grantland, Jayski and its set of local-market destinations. ESPN maintains its typical sizable lead in time spent among sports sites, holding a 32.1% category share of the online sports audience compared to Yahoo's 19.9%. Fox' rise in the comScore rankings, meanwhile, owes in significant part to continued growth of the Yardbarker blog network, which Fox bought in '10. Yardbarker posted 21.49 million unique users during January, nearly equal to the 21.97 million generated by FoxSports.com itself.

TOP ONLINE SPORTS DESTINATIONS IN JANUARY (BY UNIQUE VISITORS)
RANK	SITE	UNIQUES (000)
1	Yahoo Sports	54,964
2	FoxSports.com	38,649
3	ESPN.com	38,296
4	NFL.com	24,269
5	Turner/SI Digital*	20,012
6	Big Lead Sports**	19,616
7	CBSSports.com	15,938
8	USA Today Sports Media Group***	14,980
9	NBCSports.com	14,707
10	SBNation.com	11,169

NOTES: * = Sites include NBA.com, SI.com, NASCAR.com, PGATour.com, PGA.com, NCAA.com and WNBA.com.. ** = Sites include The Big Lead, HoopsHype.com, HoopsWorld.com, KFFL.com, The Huddle, BaseballHQ.com and other sites within Fantasy Sports Ventures Inc. *** = Sites include 81 local Gannett newspaper sites, 23 Gannett-owned broadcast TV station sites, HighSchoolSports.net and the BNQT Media Group, which includes MMAjunkie.com.