ESPN: Mobile web surges during college football season

ESPN reports surging audience interest across its media platforms throughout the recent 2008 college football season, with the sports broadcasting giant's ESPN.com website and its mobile website both recording their most-trafficked year ever for college pigskin content. According to ESPN, mobile web traffic increased to 59.9 million visits during the fall, growing 185 percent year-over-year from the 639 million visits posted during the 2007 campaign. In addition, fans seeking college football information via mobile spent more than 7 minutes on average looking at content. Top games included the recent SEC Championship game pairing Alabama against Florida, which generated 7.5 million page views, and the instant-classic Texas versus Texas Tech matchup, with 6.7 million page views.

ESPN adds that on the wired web, ESPN.com's college football-related page views grew 6 percent to nearly 885 million, with total visits increasing 5 percent to 232 million. According to market research firm Hitwise, ESPN.com accounted for 25 percent of average Saturday visits to all online college football content destinations--interestingly, fans averaged 5 minutes per visit, two fewer minutes than mobile web users. The 2008-09 Bowl Schedule was the most-viewed single page, already registering more than 2.2 million page views.

For more on ESPN's web traffic growth:
- read this release

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