Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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January 21, 2008
Football: transfer traffic and the Kevin Keegan effect
We’re currently in the middle of a seasonal peak in traffic to our Sports – Football category. As the chart below illustrates, football (soccer) websites are receiving their highest level of traffic since the season started last summer, and slightly more than this time last year.
The reason for the increase is the January transfer window: searches for both ‘transfer’ and ‘transfers’ have increased significantly since Christmas. Search terms related to transfer rumours are the most popular, and the two sites that have picked up most traffic from these searches (99%+ of it organic) are Football-Rumours.com and footballtransfers.co.uk. Visitors to both sites skew towards men, but not as heavily as you might expect; 48.1% of visitors to Football-Rumours.com are female.
The two players with most transfer related search activity over the last month were Nicolas Anelka (Bolton Wanderers to Chelsea) and Dimitar Berbatov (Tottenham Hotspur to nowhere, at least for now). As the chart below illustrates, searches for ‘berbatov’ have declined in line with speculation over Spurs’ Blugarian striker’s future, while searches for ‘anelka’ continue to rise as the French forward settles in at Stamford Bridge. I’ve charted their surnames because there are more searches for these than the full names.
Wikipedia, Football and News & Media sites (in particular BBC Sport, The Sun and The Times) are currently the main destinations for people searching for both Anelka and Berbatov - although in the latter case, fan site berbatov.net was the number one destination for the 5 weeks ending 12 January.
Of course, the big football story last week was Kevin Keegan’s return to St James’s Park. As you can see from the chart below, Newcastle United's official homepage received a huge boost following the news.
The Toon Army faithful helped move their club to number 5 in the Premier League homepage rankings last week. As the table below illustrates, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal remain at the top of the table, and together account for almost half of all visits to our custom category of the 20 Premier League official club homepages. Potential relegation candidates Bolton and Wigan are at the bottom of our list, but Derby fans can take heart from the fact that, when it comes to Internet support at least, their team is firmly mid-table.
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
Posted to Men | Search | Sport | Women
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Comments
I think you forgot the most important factor, which is backed up by the stats, the turmoil Liverpool FC is in at the moment.
Their owners have falling out with the manager, tapped up another manager and openly admitted to this!, another investment group from Dubai is rumoured to be preparing a bid and the owners are trying to remortgage their loan to put the debt against the club rather than their own belongings.
Anelka, Keegan and Berbatov might generate quite a bit of traffic, but looking at the figures most football related traffic was generated by the scenes happening at Anfield
Posted by: Daan Jansonius at January 22, 2008 01:26 PM
Hi Daan - thanks for the comment. You're right that Liverpool news / speculation has generated traffic for their site, but Liverpool are always at the top of that table. They have been consistently for the last 3 years, bar one week when they were overtaken by ManU!
One other useful bit of data that have come in since the blog: 'newcastle united' was the fastest moving search term last week across All Categories in the UK.
Robin
Posted by: Robin Goad at January 23, 2008 04:51 PM
