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.