Regular visitors to this particular stretch of the blogosphere may remember my first ever comScore post, which charted the influx in traffic to MLS.com following the signing of David Beckham to the LA Galaxy…

A year on and online interest in the MLS remains strong, and I am pleased to say that the league became a comScore Media Metrix client in June 2008, in a month that saw the site rack up 394,000 U.S. and a total of 500,000 worldwide visitors.

Indeed, whether you want to attribute it directly to “the Beckham factor” or not (I, of course, am inclined to do so), U.S. interest in soccer is undoubtedly picking up, as this recent analysis of traffic to UEFA.com – the official website of the Union of European Football Associations and the tournament’s organizing body - during Euro2008 shows.

Total Unique Visitors (000)* to Uefa.com Age 15+, Home & Work Locations May – June 2008 Source: comScore World Metrix
Country	May-08	Jun-08	% Change
Europe	3,458	9,102	163
Outside Europe	2,639	8,536	223
United States	274	1,032	277
Italy	213	751	253
Austria	61	200	226
Germany	604	1893	214
Switzerland	105	314	198
Netherlands	159	443	178
Portugal	77	208	171
Belgium	73	197	170
Spain	135	326	141
Norway	18	44	140
France	275	627	128
United Kingdom	697	1383	98
Ireland	30	52	75
Sweden	48	82	69
Denmark	37	57	55
Russian Federation	267	367	37
Finland	N/A	78	N/A

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

**Rankings based on the 16 individually reportable European countries in comScore World Metrix, + U.S. Total European Internet audience figures are comprehensive and include visitation from countries that are not individually reportable.

European traffic to UEFA.com grew 163 percent in June 2008 (Euro2008 was played between June 7 and June 29) to reach over 9 million unique visitors. Outside of Europe, the tournament also generated great interest online, with unique visitor numbers increasing 223 percent to 8.5 million.

However the most fascinating finding is that during the month in which the tournament was played, U.S. traffic to UEFA.com increased more dramatically than any of the European countries analysed (277 percent), growing at a faster month on month rate than World Cup winners Italy (253) percent, and tournament hosts Austria (226 percent) and Switzerland (198 percent). This highlights the increasing popularity of the sport in the U.S. If the sky was crying when Bex left the U.K., it is certainly looking rosier over U.S. soccer fields these days…

I was recently privileged to be asked to appear in Adam Buxton’s excellent new BBC3 pilot, MeeBox.

While my fleeting performance in the all too familiar guise of “cheeky cockney rogue” did little to set the world ablaze, the screening of the show itself represented an important signpost in the evolution of online video. As the Times Online recently put it, welcome to the world of Internet TV.

When I made my last post a month or so ago, I focused on the technological implications of the convergence of television and the Internet, but what is also becoming increasingly interesting is the cultural effects that online video is beginning to have on the traditional television medium.

MeeBox is made up entirely of online video style content, a full length television sketch show dedicated to the humorous clips of the online video world. The whole thing is polished off with an exclusive soundtrack from the awesome and equally online savvy, Radiohead, reaffirming that what was once thought the preserve of a very niche community of early adopters has now well and truly made it into the mainstream.

Even more captivating is that the show – like almost all of the BBC’s content these days – was made instantly available online via the BBC iPlayer. So that’s online videos, packaged together and screened as a television show, distributed over the Internet…what’s that about life imitating art… imitating life?!

The comScore figures certainly underline the uptake in online video usage over the past year. According to comScore, YouTube alone has grown 71 percent over the past twelve months to reach 307 million worldwide visitors in May 2008, with 18.4 million of these visitors coming from within the U.K.

Analysis from comScore Video Metrix, which was launched in the U.K. earlier this year, shows that online video viewing in the U.K. is rising sharply. The number of videos being watched by U.K. viewers grew significantly over the first quarter of 2008, increasing 13 percent from December 2007 to reach 3.5 billion videos for the month of March, while the total time spent watching videos online grew 10 percent, to reach a total of 172 million hours in March.

The growing importance of online video technology – to both the Internet and traditional media alike – cannot be overstated, and to view this medium simply as a technological advancement that offers an alternative way of distributing moving pictures would be to underestimate its appeal. This sector has become a cultural phenomenon that is changing the way we think about and interact with media, and as the screeing of MeeBox last weekend showed, this is a culture that looks set to become ever more engrained into the mainstream.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
  - William Shakespeare, 1594

When I first joined the media industry a few years ago, the big buzz was around “converging media.” What began as a vision of a brave new world in which magazines would be mobile (imagine that!) and toasters would read out the morning headlines, was quickly hijacked as a fashionable euphemism for the migration of content online. The Internet it was feared, would become something of a “threat” to traditional media…the big black hole in the corner swallowing up everything and anything that it could.

And so we come to the present day. And a world in which 57% of the U.K.’s total population is watching videos online…a world in which the BBC, the godfather of the “traditional television” industry as we have come to think of it today, is beginning to build upon an already formidable online presence, with the launch of the BBC iPlayer. Significantly, the broadcaster has just signed a deal that will allow this service to be accessed through the Nintendo Wii – that’s the BBC, being broadcast over the Internet, soon to be appearing on your TV screen.

According to comScore Video Metrix, which was launched outside the U.S. this month, over 5 million people watched over 2 million hours worth of video content on BBC Sites in December. This audience accounted for just over 10% of the total U.K. country population and (just for the record) 15% of the total U.K. online population – which of course, is an ever decreasing void. What I like about this statistic is that the iPlayer wasn’t even officially launched until Christmas, so expect to see these numbers rise even further over the course of 2008, especially given that the iPlayer brings with it full length BBC shows!

And when you consider that the iPlayer is still a U.K. specific product, in a company that derives around 60% of its online traffic from overseas –- the potential for the iPlayer is – to go a little bit “TV drama” on you for this one – monumental! Let’s also not forget, that unlike the traditional publically funded model that the BBC runs on in the U.K., overseas the company is allowed to sell online advertising, and it does so, very successfully.

But what this all really symbolizes is the change in attitude that the industry has privately been undergoing for some time now. While the spotlight was focused on social networking in 2007, online TV was quietly making its mark. And while all that was going on, data from my U.S. comScore colleagues recently showed that the Internet now delivers 40% more Gross Ratings Points of advertising than television. The fact that the CPM’s are so much lower on the Internet is what holds down the total advertising dollars spent online.

Being able to increase CPMs for online advertising might just be the catalyst that turns these two households’ rancor to pure love, because if television broadcasters can demonstrate that they can create even more ROI for advertisers by delivering their programming content online, then a marriage between these two mediums makes for an irresistible development. If that happens, we could soon find ourselves living in a world that asks: Is this Internet television? Or television online? But in the end, what’s in a name?

In October 2007, the NFL history books were re-written, as the first ever regular season game to be played outside the U.S. was staged on the hallowed Wembley turf in London.

It was also the month that produced another NFL first, as U.K. based fans flocked to the NFL Internet Group property (owner of NFL.com) in record numbers.

And, whilst the 291,000 fans who visited the property from within the U.K. in October might seem like a drop in the ocean compared with the some 16 million fans that visited from within the U.S. that month, interest on this side of the pond is undoubtedly growing.

They say it’s not the size of the left tackle but the weight of the heart he throws into it that counts – a logic that might explain why Washington’s Clinton Portis averaged more than twice as many yards per game than LaDanian Tomlinson during the regular season!

Here in the U.K., it is not necessarily the increasing size of the online NFL audience that will be of particular interest to advertisers, but its value. As comScore CEO Magid Abraham revealed at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week, more than half of the Internet’s audience is represented by “long-tailers”, that is to say infrequent, occasional users, which is a notoriously difficult segment for advertisers to reach.

Not so in the case of U.K. NFL fans, who have been staying up into the wee small hours to watch the games being beamed over by satellite since the mid-eighties. Online they are a highly engaged lot, averaging 42 minutes, 4.7 visits and 32 pages per month on their favourite American Football site.

But it is when you examine the heaviest segment of U.K. online sports fans that the really interesting stuff starts to shine through. Heavy U.K. Sports site users are what you might call “die-hard” NFL fans, 466% more likely to show up on the NFL Internet Group property than your average Internet user. To put this in perspective, this is 61% higher than their likelihood of visiting the Guardian “Soccer” pages, 73% higher than TheFA.com, and 78% higher than the fabled Football365.

With the BBC announcing to screen the Super Bowl for the first time in its history this February, and the NFL planning to roll back into town later in the year, expect to see U.K. traffic to NFL Internet Group grow even more in 2008.

Here in comScore’s U.K. office, we have the privilege of being surrounded by some of the most illustrious academic establishments in the world. A huge intermingling campus of activity stretches from Holborn to Chancery Lane, spilling out onto the Northbank of the river Thames. This is the true hub of the city, where all of London’s various districts of finance, media, commerce and law come to meet, and students from all over the world come to study.

So inspiring is the scenery that it got me thinking, what are the most popular universities in the U.K. as measured by the number of people who visit their Websites? And, what proportion of their visitors come from overseas?

Not surprisingly, Oxford was the most visited university Web site in the U.K. in October with 534,000 unique U.K. visitors. Cambridge wasn’t too far behind its long established rival with 434,000, but you might be surprised to see the University of Newcastle sandwiched between the two, with 461,000. Edinburgh is another popular choice – attracting 389,000 unique visitors in October, while London is represented by University College London, which received 347,000.

Top Ten U.K. University Websites Ranked by Total U.K. Unique Visitors (000) October 2007 Total U.K., Age 15+ - Home & Work Locations* Source: comScore World Metrix
Institution	Total U.K. Unique Visitors (000)	Total Worldwide Unique Visitors (000)	% of Total Unique Visitors from Overseas
Oxford	534	1,682	68
Newcastle	461	1,630	71
Cambridge	434	2,084	79
Edinburgh	389	1,277	70
University College London (UCL)	347	1,787	81
Leeds	314	734	57
Birmingham	304	605	50
Warwick	298	543	45
Bristol	291	728	60
Southampton	290	542	46

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Yet what is perhaps most startling about this list is the proportion of visitors that are accessing these sites from outside of the U.K. On average, 63 percent of the total traffic to these sites came from overseas in October, reaching as high as 81 percent in the case of UCL.

When you look at the total number of U.K. unique visitors to Oxbridge Websites you could be forgiven for thinking that Oxford has won the battle for online eyeballs. But if that is the case, then taking into consideration total worldwide traffic to these sites you would have to say that Cambridge is winning the war.

Nonetheless, I can say one thing with certainty. As I make my way home through the bustling centre of London’s academic community, I will be doubly proud tonight for two reasons. One, the great academic institutions on which this country were built are still the apple of the international eye, and are still striving to break-down cultural boundaries and build a more harmonised, cosmopolitan community. And two, at the heart of that community, at the centre of its campus, I have access to the most accurate anthropological research tool that we have ever been able to leverage: the power of comScore World Metrix data.

Hello, my name is Jamie Gavin, and I am the newest member of the comScore marketing and communications team based in our London office. As an Englishman, I am obviously a MASSIVE football (no, NOT soccer!) fan, and what better time to make the trip across the Atlantic than on the tailcoats of one of the greatest Englishmen to ever play the game. David Beckham, or ‘Bex’ as we call him on the other side of the pond, has just signed a deal reported to be worth over $250 million with US “soccer” team LA Galaxy, and for what it’s worth, here are my two cents.

In 2005, the Guardian ran an excerpt entitled “When Pele and Cosmos were Kings" from Gavin Newsham’s book Once in a Lifetime. It told the story of everything from the media frenzy surrounding Pele's arrival, to the meteoric rise of the sport in America, and eventually to Pele’s final game for the club. Apparently as the game progressed, the heavens opened, drenching the entire 75,000 congregation. The next day a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: "Even the Sky Was Crying."

But now the US has a new football hero – a modern hero – who is proving just as popular on the Internet as he ever was on the football field. According to comScore data, when Beckham announced in January that he would be signing for the LA Galaxy club, worldwide traffic to the Major League Soccer website increased by over 250%. The number of unique visitors to the site in January 2007 reached 808,000, up from 230,000 in December 2006.

Exactly half of this traffic came from within the United States, with the number of unique visitors from the U.S. in January increasing to 404,000 from 159,000 the previous month. As a new year began, American eyes were undoubtedly on David Beckham.

As a youngster growing up in England I was always fascinated by the similarities between Pele and David Beckham. The Brazilian had been immortalised to me as the man who had almost scored from the halfway line in the 1970 World Cup, but Beckham…well…he actually achieved it.

On Saturday night – injuries permitting – he will find himself stepping out into the great man’s shoes once again when he plays his first game for his new US club, LA Galaxy. The question now is, can he finally step out of his shadow and succeed where Pele could not? Can Beckham lift football to a position of permanent prominence in America?

One thing is for certain, the man who captained his country 58 times and single-handedly led them to the quarter finals of the last World Cup will be sorely missed. I checked in at home – the week before Beckham was due to be unveiled by the Galaxy it rained so much in England that half the country flooded – even the sky was crying!