When it comes to sports, ESPN has long been the dominant brand. When it comes to finding information online, Google has pretty much taken over. So if you want to find sports news online, where do you go? Yahoo of course!

As Fast Company reports on in their February issue, Yahoo!Sports is the most visited sports site on the web, which is quite a remarkable story if you think about it – and one that seems to deserve a lot of attention from those trying to figure out the rules for competition in the Web 2.0.

Personally, I think the #1, #2, and #3 reasons are the success of Yahoo! Fantasy sports, which the article notes controls almost 60% of the Fantasy Sports market. I think this because I know an extraordinary number of people addicted to Fantasy Sports games, they check out their teams very, very regularly, and as long as the sports news is connected to these pages the story kind of tells itself. Regular readers may remember Naumi’s post from last year, which offered a brief discussion of some of the lessons we can learn from fantasy sports.

Side note – between finishing that last paragraph and starting the next one, I went and checked the up-to-the-minute basketball scores in order to estimate how my team is doing today. OK, fine – how my teams are doing today. About 20 minutes had passed since I last checked. I continue to amaze myself by how… what’s the term I’m looking for here… pathetically and hopelessly addicted I am to these little games. But winning makes it all worth it. So I’m told.

Back to the main story line – there are also other interesting things to look at in relation to the growth of Yahoo! Sports. For example, the company has simutaneously been growing it’s collaborative communities (particularly in relation to group sports blogs), while also hiring the likes of Kenny Smith (ex NBA player) to write articles as part of an editorial staff that’s gone from 4 to about 50. Many, many companies have went down one of these roads, but few have found a way to pursue both in parallel in a successful way. Might the balance Yahoo! is striking here be useful for upstarts that can get a little blinded by the hypeelement surrounding the Web 2. 0, which leads them to adopting the former approach in isolation?

I imagine there are a lot of other pieces to this story, and I might just lobby Don to let me investigate them in depth for a future research project to see if there’s any surprises lying beneath the surface – can anyone think of any hypotheses off the top of their head?