Steady At The Top: Yahoo Sits Atop Feb. ComScores; Top Three Spots Unchanged

Yahoo Sports again earned the top spot of comScore's monthly reach rankings of U.S. online sports destinations, pulling in an audience of 44.63 million unique visitors in February. Largely mirroring rankings from January, the top three slots were unchanged, and the list still does not include a combined listing for Yahoo and NBC Sports that will soon begin as a result of their broad digital content and marketing partnership. The February comScore report, however, also will be among the last to feature just online traffic rankings and exclude mobile traffic. The measurement agency is about to bring its Media Metrix Multi-Platform, a unified metric that combines online and mobile traffic, out of beta and into broad release. During beta measurement in January, ESPN led the new blended comScore rankings with a total of 62.6 million unique visitors and also led the sports category in average minute audience and total consumption. The beta data also showed 39% of ESPN's digital audience in January exclusively accessed its content via smartphones and tablets. A unified metric has been long sought in the digital media industry, particularly among sports publishers that often post disproportionately large traffic spikes from mobile devices.