Hub Web firm gears up for Red Sox season
Compete Inc., a Boston firm that tracks and analyzes Web traffic, is on full Red Sox alert after Yankee big-wig Hank Steinbrenner was recently quoted as saying: "Red Sox Nation? What a bunch of [expletive] that is."
According to Compete, the number of unique visitors checking out the Red Sox website each month during last year's regular season was between 800,000 and 900,000; during that same period, the Yankees led with an additional 89,000 unique visitors each month on average to their website.
Not surprisingly, current events can have a big influence on traffic. 
When David Ortiz, Jason Varitek (right), and company led the Sox to a World Series, October website traffic spiked to about 1.1 million unique visitors, said Compete, which British media information company Taylor Nelson Sofres plc, or TNS, recently disclosed plans to buy.
Back on the baseball diamond, meanwhile, Derek Jeter and his pin-striped playmates fell idle in October as the Yankees were eliminated in the play-offs.
In October, the number of unique visitors to the Yankee website dropped to under 800,000, said Compete, which now looks to determine whether Hank Steinbrenner's rash comments will result in any serious tremors on the Yankees-Red Sox Richter scale.
Compete's new sister company, Cymfony of Boston, might be able to offer additional online insights into the Beantown-Big Apple rivalry.
According to its website, Cymfony puts to work content analysis techniques used by US intelligence agencies to "extract meaning" from content on blogs and social networks.
Last week, TNS said it was creating a new entity called TNS Media that will combine all its North American operations including Compete and Cymfony.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)
The chart above shows Compete's monthly tracking of traffic to the official Red Sox and Yankees websites. The bars in red indicate Red Sox visits, and the bars in blue show Yankee visits. Additional information from Compete on the online rivalry between Sox and the Yanks can be found at this link.
rising
falling 