(click for high resolution image)

Patriots have more online visitors, but Giants fans run up web stats

During the run up to the playoffs in December 2011, the Patriots had 644,000 unique visitors to their official website, topping the Giants’ 574,000 visitors. However, Giants fans were more engaged when visiting their team’s website, viewing nearly twice as many pages (17 page views per person) compared to Patriots visitors, and spending over 10 minutes each on average.

Super Bowl buzz: Giants fans cheer more for team, Tom Brady is MVP of social media

Fans’ excitement throughout the playoffs carried over to social media. The Giants had more buzz about their team each week, with a 59 percent share of buzz compared to the Patriots’ 41 percent of buzz volume on blogs, message boards/forums, public posts on Twitter and Facebook and online news posts.  But Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady surpassed Giants QB Eli Manning, with nearly double the amount of buzz.

• In terms of DMA’s (Designated Market Area), Phoenix is ranked 12th and Pittsburgh 23^rd of the 56 metered markets. The 2006 Super Bowl featured a similar match-up with Seattle, ranked the 13^th largest DMA, against Pittsburgh, then 22^nd. That game received a 57.4 rating in Pittsburgh and 54.4 in Seattle (compared to 41.6 nationally).

• From 1999-2008, the highest single-year metered market performance was delivered in Jacksonville in 2005 (NE-PHI played in Jacksonville) with a 58.9 HH rating. For a participating team’s market, Atlanta owns the largest HH rating with a 58.2 in 1999 (DEN-ATL). Over the past decade, the Kansas City DMA has averaged the highest household rating, with 49.5% of television households tuning in to the Super Bowl each year (see chart below).

• Last year’s thrilling Super Bowl owes a large part of its record-breaking ratings’ success to a late-game viewer surge. At 10:02 PM, the final minute of the game, viewership peaked at a 51.3 HH rating, 72 share and over 112 million viewers. The final 30 minutes of the broadcast delivered a 47.5 HH rating. This was a 13% increase compared to all prior minutes (42.0).

• Since 2002, every Super Bowl has had its highest rating point occur in the 4^th quarter and - in all but one instance - after 10PM ET (the Bears-Colts ended at 9:57PM ET). Additionally, Super Bowls that went down to the wire (NE-STL, NE-CAR, NYG-NE) experience a late increase in share percent, while games that were less competitive (TB-OAK, NE-PHI, PITT-SEA, IND-CHI) had share levels that were flat or declining in the final half hour.

• The Super Bowl ratings are higher in HD households. Last year’s game received a 56.5 rating in HD capable/receivable homes. These homes over-indexed the composite HH rating by 31%.

Professional baseball, football, basketball, hockey — and even NASCAR — all converge in October, making it one of the year’s busiest sports months.  Unfortunately, that plethora of options frequently presents sports fans with difficult TV viewing decisions.

Take this past Sunday — when NBC’s Sunday Night Football carried live coverage of the San Diego Chargers playing the New England Patriots.  Meanwhile, Game 3 of the MLB National League Championship Series aired live on FOX.

NBC’s broadcast drew an average audience of 13.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen, while FOX’s MLB coverage drew 8.8 million average viewers. 

The two games, broadcast simultaneously, triggered a fair bit of channel switching.  According to Nielsen Sports, 37% of NBC’s Sunday Night Football audience watched at least six minutes of FOX’s MLB coverage.  Meanwhile, 48% of those who watched the baseball game also watched at least six minutes of NBC’s NFL coverage.