Net Notebook: ESPN Loses Phillips
ESPN Internet Ventures announced Thursday that Tom Phillips, president and general manager of ESPN, will be leaving the company. Geoff Reiss, currently a senior vice president of production and programming, will immediately assume Phillips' responsibilities as acting general manager.
Phillips, 42, was also president of
ABC Sports Online
. He had joined Bellevue, Wash.-based
Starwave
five years ago as vice president of sports, but moved to New York after
Disney
(DIS) - Get Walt Disney Company Report
took a controlling interest in Starwave. (Starwave provides Web site technology for
TheStreet.com
.)
Reiss didn't want to comment yet on the personnel move, and referred all questions to the outfit's public relations arm.
"We have no comment, other than to say that Reiss' new title will be acting general manager," said the spokesman, who added that he didn't know where Phillips was going next.
Let's Rumble
The online sports battle is getting personal. For the first time, CBS SportsLine is taking on its main rival, ESPN.com, a unit of Disney, through a series of print advertisements, according to a CBS SportsLine spokesperson. (ESPN.com recently changed its name from ESPN SportsZone.)
"Move over and let the big dog eat," one SportsLine fan named Mark Mariani is quoted as saying in an ad for CBS SportsLine in this week's
TheStreet Recommends
SportsBusiness Journal
. The rivalry has heated up to a feverish pitch this fall thanks to the re-emergence of
Fox's
sports site, the start of the football season and the second-by-second
McGwire-Sosa
updates from each site. ESPN.com gloated that it had posted its story on McGwire's 62nd home run by the time the
St. Louis Cardinals
slugger "was rounding third base."
The three sites have plenty of influence on gridiron fans because of their affiliations with different television channels. ESPN.com has
ESPN's Sunday Night Football
and
ABC's Monday Night Football
; CBS SportsLine receives plugs on CBS during American Football Conference games (CBS Sports owns an 11% stake in CBS SportsLine); and Fox receives tie-ins from Fox Sports' National Football Conference telecasts. ESPN.com and CBS SportsLine are neck 'n neck for the top online spot, while Fox is way behind third place
CNN/SI
, a unit of
Time Warner
(TWX)
.
For the month of August, CNN/SI had 1.9 million unique users, while Fox Sports only had 435,000 visitors, according to
Media Metrix
, a New York-based online media tracker.
Virtual Village No More
The Internet may be akin to a global village, but when it comes to Web sites, people from different ends of the country don't always circulate in the same virtual neighborhoods.
That's the conclusion you can draw from looking at recent data from
RelevantKnowledge
, one of the companies that tracks visitors' travels across the World Wide Web. When you compare the habits of Web surfers from the West Coast with those in the Northeast, you can find significant differences in where each group goes. And it's not just the obvious, geography-specific ones like New York Sidewalk or the California state Web site.
Look at the
Weather Channel's
Weather.com site, for example. Across the country, 8.6% of people surfing the Web in August visited the site at least once. In RelevantKnowledge's "North Atlantic" region, 13.4% of the population visited. But in the "Pacific" region, only a third of that number made the trip. Makes sense if you have sunny weather all year-round. A Weather Channel spokeswoman says the geographic difference could be explained by the East Coast's concern over August's hurricanes Bonnie and Danielle .
It also appears that people on the East Coast have a greater interest in figuring out where they're going to in the real world. MapQuest, the map and travel site, is nearly twice as popular on the East Coast as on the West. Same for the Preview Travel and Travelocity sites, which enjoy more visits from the East than the West.
Search engines are more popular in the East than in the West, except for Wired's HotBot and San Mateo, Calif.-based
InfoSeek
(SEEK)
.
But the hardest to figure out are why both
Netscape
(NSCP)
and
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Microsoft Corporation Report
are significantly more popular in the Northeast than they are in the West. Microsoft's site, microsoft.com, attracts 44.7% of easterners versus 32.3% of West Coasters. Netscape.com has similarly lopsided figures.
Anyone with a clue why -- especially since visitors to
America Online's
(AOL)
aol.com are evenly spread -- please e-mail us a clue.
