For five consecutive months, ESPN.com sat on top of the monthly comScore sports website rankings. But in came the Olympics in February and the Yahoo-NBC alliance jumped out in front over ESPN breaking the Worldwide Leader’s streak.
February saw 63.6 million unique visitors and 5 billion minutes consumed on the Yahoo-NBC platforms. That outranked ESPN by 13% in unique visitors (56.5 million) and 20% in minutes consumed (4.2 billion).
It marked the first time since August 2013 that Yahoo-NBC was first in the comScore rankings.
Here’s the ranking of the top five sites for February (courtesy Sports Business Journal):
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FEBRUARY ’14 COMSCORES
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| RANK | SITE | UNIQUES (000) |
| 1) | Yahoo Sports-NBC Sports Network * | 63,637 |
| 2) | ESPN | 56,488 |
| 3) | Bleacher Report-Turner Sports Network ** | 48,238 |
| 4) | FoxSports.com on MSN | 46,275 |
| 5) | USA Today Sports Media Group *** | 40,508 |
Does this mean a new king in digital media? We need to see a few months like before we declare Yahoo-NBC a winner, but this has to be encouraging for this alliance which was established in 2012. It has been number one before until ESPN overtook the top spot last year.
With the NCAA Tournament in March and ESPN so closely associated with college basketball, it would not be a surprise to see its site re-take the top line in the rankings.
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