• by Masha Geller , April 4, 2001

If baseball fans are you target audience, you may want to consider geo-targeting your online advertising to Cleveland, Atlanta and Boston.

A new Scarborough Sports Marketing study reveals that Cleveland (32%), Atlanta (30%) and Boston (28%) lead the nation with the highest percentage of Internet savvy Major League Baseball (MLB) fans.

The study shows that these markets have a high percentage of people who are both online and are loyal major league baseball fans. These fans surf the Web primarily for sports updates and scores, news and shopping.

Other cities with a high concentration of loyal MLB fans and online access include Seattle (28% and St. Louis (28%) and San Diego (27%). The U.S. cities with the lowest percentage of baseball fans using the web are Flint, Mich. (10%); Salt Lake City (9%); and Charleston, W.Va. (8%), which are all markets without MLB teams.

Not only do fans access the Internet, but they also spend quality time online. In fact, according to Scarborough's National Internet Study, over half spend five or more hours online in an average week (51%), and more than one-quarter (26%) spend 10 or more hours surfing the net. While they are online, fans devote time to sports-related activities, such as checking for scores or other sports info (46%) and visiting a sports site (60%). As one would expect, MLB.com is definitely a popular sports site with loyal MLB fans. More than one-third have visited the site in the past 30 days.

This study also reveals that MLB fans do plenty of online shopping. Nearly three-quarters of fans have logged on to shop (72%), with 66% actually purchasing goods in the past six months. Fans are also 40% more likely than other Internet users to buy sporting goods or tickets to a sporting event online and 64% more likely to have visited ESPN.com in the past month.