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I'll preface this by saying I've been studying this 100hot list and
other web data for awhile.  I can add a bit to this conversation:

Usually Golf and during the winter skiing, have as many or more sites
in the top 100.  The big advantage to soccer is that soccer has more
of the top sites than any of the other sports.

There are no ties on this list.  These companies are all listed
together because they are owned or operated by the same entity.  The
Starwave Corporation operates (or do they own?) the websites for ESPN
Sportszone, NBA.com, NFL.Com, WNBA.com and probably some others I am
missing.

Soccernet in the February report was listed at #2 while CBS Sportsline
was listed at number #3.  CricInfo was listed at about #5?  GolfWeb
was at approx. #20.  So Soccernet on it's own is bigger in terms of
traffic/usage than CBS Sportsline.  CBS Sportsline being the wise
company they are, decided to spend the money from their intial public
stock offering to buy shares of or major sponsorships of several major
niche sports sites.  100Hot.com this month is listing Soccernet,
GolfWeb, and CricInfo as the same listing because they have all been
made a part of the CBS Sportsline group. (I know Golf Web was sold for
approx. $4 million.  I wonder how much Soccernet was worth?)

The large reach of ESPN.com, NBA.com etc. are apparent when The top
#2, #3, #5 and #25 web sites all combine and still does not equal the
traffic on the Starwave web sites.

You missed one Dave.  This is apparent because it takes you to an ISP.
 100hot.com made the change to list all of Merseyworld because so many
LiverPool FC sites were based on this ISP.  It is the same situation
as listing CBS Sportsline and the other web sites as one listing.  So
Merseyworld is what shows up when this listing is really so high
because of the: http://anfield.merseyworld.com/  Liverpool The Mighty
Reds web site. (This website used to be a top 5 website second only to
soccernet but has dropped in popularity the last 6 months and it used
to be listed as the Mighty Reds web site not Merseyworld.)

Dave, You missed another.. This is not a Soccer site at all but is
instead a Formula 1 site ;)  I don't know how you could confuse the
two.. except of course spectators sometimes get killed in both. (bad
joke)

Yet another web site that is immediately apparent as being soccer.
The Cecchi Gori Group is an Italian media company.  They host a web
site for Fiorentina A.C. and also a web site which I think is for a
children's tv show called: Goalnet or something like that.. I don't
really know Italian but I can tell you the thing is called Goalnet and
is orineted towards children.. it may not be a television show but I
got the impression it was..

So this makes 10 of the top 100 websites are soccer related and 7 of
the top 50!  That by far is more than any other single sport.

How does 100Hot get their ratings?  The ratings are made from reports
which are taken from the proxy servers of major Internet Providers.
Basically a proxy server helps speed up people's connections by
keeping copies of heavily trafficed web sites at the internet
provider.  The advantage of taking the logs of the proxy server is you
can see how many people actually went to the site.  Web site log files
may report a different number because data is being cached in a proxy
server..

In English what does this mean?  100Hot uses a very good method of
determining who is visiting web sites at major internet providers.
This report includes 200-300,000 users.  

The problems I see with this method:  

The track total traffic only.. so you can't see how many people are
repeat visitors, visit once and never return etc.

They also list all web sites within a company under one listing.  It
is impossible to see how well soccernet does vs. nfl.com or nba.com.

Of course you can pay 100hot.com for the full featured service and get
better data than this.. But for our purposes I don't think it matters.

(Thanks for letting a techno geek waste your bandwidth)

Ben
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