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Who do you love?

Jason posted 8/10/2007 from ballhype.com

Link love. It makes the sports blogging world go round. It also provides lots of data for the gnomes at Ballhype to chew on, spit out and rearrange into pretty pictures. Example: linking patterns, which we use to help find top stories and are the sole basis for our blog rankings. I've been meaning to perform a linking study for a while now, but Larry Brown's ESPN hypocrisy story from a couple of weeks ago finally provided the impetus to get it done.

For the charts below, I looked at which sites our tracked blogs linked to over the past 90 days. During this period, we analyzed just over 150,000 blog posts and 500,000 links.

First, I decided to group blogger links into 5 categories: mainstream media sites like ESPN.com, sports blogs like Deadspin, official league sites like MLB.com, video sites like YouTube, and reference sites like Baseball-Reference.com. Not surprisingly, mainstream media comprised the biggest slice with 56%. However, sports blogs weren't too far behind, with roughly 1/3 of all links.

I next drilled into each of the categories to find leaders and trends. ESPN continues to dominate among mainstream media sites, although Sports Illustrated has gained ground in the two weeks since LB's post. Note that the ESPN figures don't include the True Hoop or Hashmarks blogs. Here are each of the sites that command at least 1% of the total mainstream media links:

Up next: official league sites. It isn't surprising that MLB.com would lead the way during the summer months, but the extent of its domination over the other sports is noteworthy (59% for MLB.com, and 75% if you throw in Minor League Baseball). Besides the seasonality, it's boosted by the fact that there are a lot more blogs out there dedicated to baseball than other sports (at least in the English language). MLB.com is also arguably the cream of the crop of league sites, and it certainly produces a ton of content (e.g., two takes on every game recap, speed and trajectory data for every pitch).

Ballhype tracks video from a number of different providers: YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, Uncut Video, Break, Funny or Die, Brightcove, Photobucket, Heavy, and The Onion. But for all intents and purposes, video linking and embedding is a one-horse race, with YouTube commanding 90% of all linked clips.

Finally, ESPN's overall dominance makes it a good candidate for an additional breakdown. I combined links to both the mainstream news site as well as its blogs, then grouped them by section. For factors mentioned previously, seeing MLB in the #1 slot isn't too surprising. The NBA also benefited from the fact that it was in season for a portion of the period analyzed.

Warrants mentioning: Bill Simmons is obviously a force by this measure, with 39% of the Page 2 links (and 4% of total ESPN links) going to Sports Guy's World. But according to sports bloggers, Henry Abbott has surpassed Simmons in the WWL's online pantheon—with True Hoop receiving almost twice as many links over this period.

I decided against including any general blog-to-blog links analyses here, mainly because that kind of thing is covered by our blog rankings. However, I do plan to perform more studies like this going forward, so leave a note if there are other areas you'd like to see researched.