Facebook Dominates New Online Rankings As World Cup Lifts ESPN

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 29, 10:14AM EDT · Published Jul 29, 4:38AM EDT

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The June audience of ESPN.com soared to 30.6 million unique visitors as people checked out the World Cup online, according to research firm comScore. That moved it ahead of well-known sites including Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), and Target (NYSE: TGT). It shows how one event, or one new product from a company can increase its online traffic, and probably how quickly that audience can falter.

Adobe’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) site increased to 37.5 million unique visitors in June, most likely because of its launch of new versions of its popular Flash tools and its dispute with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) over the hardware company’s decision to not use Flash on devices such as the iPhone.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) kept its top spot in comScore in June with 178.8 unique visitors. Yahoo! (NASDAQ; YHOO) was second with 170.2 million, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) third with 160.8 million. Facebook improved upon its popularity as its audience moved it into fourth place among US sites with 141.6 million unique visitors. Facebook also has a tremendous audience overseas and recently passed the milestone of 500 million members.

The comScore figures tell two things. The first is that a site like ESPN can have a one-time improvement. This may be good for the web property’s advertisers–for one month. But what happens in July, August, and for the rest of the year? ESPN will have to drop ad rates, suffer a decline in revenue for July — at least compared with June.

The other number that stands out is Facebook’s. Its audience will only have to grow 12% to get to the level of Microsoft users at June levels. At 21% improvement will move it ahead of Yahoo!

The comScore number highlights the great threat that Facebook poses to the traditional web portals and perhaps eventually to Google. Facebook has much more display inventory than the web portals do, and its sells that inventory at lower prices than MSN and Yahoo! do, which puts downward pressure on all online ad prices.

If Facebook’s audience moves to the level of Google’s, the changes the social media company has brought to the online world will be even more dangerous to its competitors.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.