A staggering 79% of sports fans polled in the Aura Sports Fan Survey have stated that their team or official body website is the most important popular medium for accessing sports results, news and information, while 61% plumped for national newspaper sports pages, 50% terrestrial TV, 46% cable and satellite TV, 37% radio, 35% teletext, 24% magazine and 6% mobile text alerts.

The survey also revealed that Sports fans access the Internet more often and have faster Internet connections than general web users, with 79% accessing the web on a daily basis, while 97% go online at least on a once a week.

The survey was commissioned by specialised digital sports agency, Aura Sports, and conducted by research group Skopos. It surveyed 17 sports sites in the Aura Sports network between October and December 2004 in order to better understand their audience.

In all, a total of 4,624 fans completed the 24-question survey. The websites used, covered a number of sports and featured both official club and rights holders’ web sites, including www.manutd.com, www.chelseafc.com and www.rfu.com alongside fan-based sites such as www.4thegame.com.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that some 46% of respondents agreed that if a brand advertises on Official Websites then it must be trustworthy. Similarly 36% stated that they are more likely to buy a product advertised on an official website than products advertised elsewhere.

Paul Wright, MD of Aura Sports says;

“The industry has long suspected the power of sports brands online, and now we have the detailed analysis of just how powerful the medium is. What is particularly evident is the trust that fans invest in their official websites. They are viewed as the source of definitive proof on news stories that may appear in other media. They also give brands that advertise on them a kind of reflected halo of trust. And that trust extends to the commercial partners of those sites.”

“The official sites have all moved on enormously from the days when they were in effect very dry, almost neutered sources of information, and they have now become respected as an interesting, entertaining and crucial media in their own right.”

To view more results of the Aura Sports Fans Survey, please visit Fans Survey

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