Yahoo! Cricket is the top most visited cricket site in India: comScore

In a study on sports sites in India, comScore has revealed that more than 10 million Internet users visited sports sites in January

A latest report by the Internet research firm, comScore, indicates that viewership or usage of sports and cricket websites in the country has increased over the past year.

According to the report, about 10.4 million users, of the total 37.2 million Internet users, visited sports websites at home or at the workplace in January 2010, as compared to 5.2 million users in January 2009. The total number of Internet users in January 2009 was 32.5 million.

comScore does not monitor Internet consumption habits of cyber café users and websites surfed through mobile phones.

It is also revealed that the total time spent and the number of page views in the sports category websites have doubled in the last one year. An average sports category visitor spent about 30 minutes at sports sites, viewed 41 pages of content and visited the sports sites nearly 6 times throughout the month (January 2010). In the same month in 2009, an average sports category user spent about 29 minutes, checked 39 pages and landed more than 4 times on sports category sites.

Amongst the sports sites, it is the cricket related sites which topped the list of sports sites in both January 2009 and 2010.

This year, the top spot for the sports sites in India is held by Yahoo! Cricket, with 3.9 million unique visitors and a growth of about 305 per cent since January 2009. The ESPN website, Cricinfo.com, with 3.5 million unique visitors, is ranked second.

The sports site which has shown a tremendous growth in traffic is Sify Sports. The site is ranked third and has grown by 379 per cent. It received 1 million unique visitors in January 2010, as compared to 2 lakh unique visitors in January 2009.

Interestingly, the fifth most visited sports site is a US based portal named Faniq.com, which has received about 7 lakh unique visitors in January 2010.

Neo Sports owned CrickeNirvana.com received about 5 lakh unique visitors, while the cricket portal Cricketnext.com got around 3 lakh unique visitors in January 2010.

In an official communiqué, Will Hodgman, executive vice-president, Asia Pacific, comScore, says, "The sports category has experienced tremendous growth throughout last year as more Indians turned to the Internet as their first source of up-to-the-minute news on their favourite teams and players."