Start of Premiership Season Sets Off Stampede of Traffic to Fantasy Football Sites

Fans Use Office Hours to Pick Their Fantasy Teams

Online Newspaper Sites Benefit from Rush of Traffic to Fantasy Football Pages

LONDON, UK, OCTOBER 22, 2007 – Comscore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its report on U.K. online fantasy football usage, based on data collected through the Comscore World Metrix audience measurement service.

Participation in online fantasy football leagues, which allow football fans to pick and manage their very own dream team from the Premiership roster, resulted in a large surge in traffic to fantasy football sites in the month of August, as fans rushed to pick their teams ahead of the start of the 2007/08 Premiership season.

Usage of fantasy football sites grew steadily over the course of the week leading up to the start of the new Premiership season, as fans watched attentively for the last of the summer’s transfers to go through before finalizing their squads. Participation in fantasy football proved just as popular during office hours as it did of an evening, with 47.9 percent of the total time spent on these sites from Monday through Friday occurring between 9:00am and 5:00pm.

*Based on data collected from the eight sites selected for the Comscore Fantasy Football Study (see table below)

**Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Bob Ivins, EVP of International Markets at Comscore said: “The proportion of time being spent on these sites during office hours is significant. On the Friday before the start of the Premiership season alone, over 230,000 hours were spent on the fantasy football sites analyzed in this study, and 52 percent of them occurred during office hours. Obviously, you would expect the actual amount of time being spent on these sites to level off over the course of the season, but it will be very interesting to see if the office share of total time spent remains the same. There has been a lot of attention drawn recently to the impact that social networking sites are having on the working day, but as these Comscore figures show, it is not just the social networking sector that is currently enjoying a significant in-office following.”

Increased Traffic

The most popular fantasy football site in the U.K. in August was fantasy.premierleague.com, the official fantasy league of the Barclays Premier League. The site, which is hosted on the league’s official website, Premierleague.com, attracted 1.4 million unique users in August, up 135 percent from the previous month. Eighty one percent of all visitors to Premierlague.com also visited the site’s fantasy football pages. Fantasyleague.com, the online offering of Fantasy League Ltd – the creators of the U.K.’s original fantasy football league in 1991, grew 90 percent to 858,000 unique users. The property hosts the fantasy leagues of some of the largest online media properties in the U.K., including Sky Sports, Channel4 and the Guardian.

Andrew Wainstein, Managing Director of Fantasyleague.com said, “Traditional fantasy football formats have established themselves extremely well on the Internet because they are the ultimate user participation platform in a Web 2.0 world. The immediacy of team statistics and injury reports encourages fantasy managers to really engage with site content and pushes traffic to related pages on the host website. The huge upsurge in traffic to these sites in August is an indication of fans waiting as long as possible to pick their team, so they can get as clear an idea as possible of the summer transfers. The immediacy of the online world facilitates this need extremely well”.

*Based on a selection of comparable sites, does not constitute a direct ranking

** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Online newspaper sites benefited from a surge in traffic to their fantasy football pages. The Sun led the charge with its fantasy football service, dreamteamfc.com, a subscription league with a cash prize pot totalling £500,000. The site grew 54 percent to reach 1.1 million unique users in August. A similar offering from the Mirror newspaper, youthemanager.co.uk, grew 145 percent in August to reach 76,000 unique users.Other popular fantasy football leagues being hosted by national newspaper properties included the Telegraph whose fantasy league pages attracted 189,000 unique users in August. The Metro’s offering, fantasyfootball.metro.co.uk, grew 32 percent to reach 146,000 unique users, while the Times’ site, playthegame.timesonline.co.uk grew 58 percent to 95,000.

About Comscore

Comscore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world. This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given Comscore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. Comscore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Through its proprietary technology, Comscore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes. Comscore analysts apply this deep knowledge of customers and competitors to help clients design powerful marketing strategies and tactics that deliver superior ROI. Comscore services are used by more than 700 clients, including global leaders such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, BBC, Carat, Cyworld, Deutsche Bank, France Telecom, Best Buy, The Newspaper Association of America, Financial Times, ESPN, Fox Sports, Nestlé, Starcom, Universal McCann, the United States Postal Service, Verizon, ViaMichelin, Merck and Expedia. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com

Ayaan Mohamud
Comscore, Inc.
+ 44 (0) 207-099-1775
worldpress@comscore.com