Analyst Weblog
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Although the lower leagues had already kicked off earlier in the month, the football season truly got underway this weekend with the first Barclays Premier League matches. As you would expect, UK Internet visits to key football related websites increased significantly last week: the Official Fantasy Premier League site by 186%, Sky Sports by 15%. There was a 12% increase in traffic to BBC Sport but, as the table below illustrates, it has yet to reach the same level for traffic it experienced during the World Cup.

All of the three sites mentioned above ranked amongst the top 100 most visited in the UK last week, with BBC Sport in 13th position and Sky Sports at number 15. Joining them in the top 100, in 70th position, was the Sky Digital TV Shop, the place where people go to either purchase Sky TV or upgrade their packages (we have only recently categorised this site within Hitwise, hence the lack of historical data in the chart above). The site is most popular in the North East, although Walsall is the individual postal area that that currently most over-indexes in terms of traffic. This perhaps reflects the fact that there are four teams from West Midlands (Aston Villa, West Brom, Birmingham City, Wolves) competing in the top flight of English football this season - the first time this has happened for 27 years.
The main driver for all this traffic was clearly the demand for the Sky Sports channels, and searches for the terms ‘sky sports’ and ‘sky sports football’ increased by 38% and 22% respectively last week. These were the two most popular of 3,700 different ways in which people searched for the channels last week. Aggregating all of these together using our new broad matching tool, we can see that all of these variations accounted for 1% of all UK searches last week – i.e. 1 in every 100 searches in the UK was related to Sky Sports.

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Posted by Robin Goad at 10:30 AM
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In Categories BBC | Demographics | Fast moving search terms | Football | Postal Areas data | Search | Sport | TV | World Cup 2010
Did all 3700 search variations contain the word sky?
Posted by John | August 23, 2010 04:08 PM