If the Super Bowl was a popularity contest, looking at the traffic levels to the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts websites before the game would have led me to predict a win for the Bears. During the month of January, the market share of visits to Chicago Bears website was twice as large as the share of visits to the Colts website. Even on game day, Bears’ traffic exceeded Colts’ traffic, and only after the game did traffic to the Colts website exceed the Bears.

The leading downstream site for both teams’ websites in the month of January was their respecitve teams’ pro shop. Store.chicagobears.com accounted for 15.5% of visits leaving ChicagoBears.com in January, while Indianapolis Colts Pro Shop accounted for 13% of Colts.com downstream traffic. However, analysis of traffic to the pro shop sites shows that Colts fans were nearly as passionate as Bears fans in looking at team merchandise, particularly after each team’s league championship game. Of course after the game on Sunday and Monday, traffic to the Colts pro shop skyrocketed by 218% when comparing 2/3/07 to 2/5/07, while traffic to the Bears’ pro shop plummeted by 54% in the same period.

Not surprising, but it makes me wonder, why is anyone at all visiting the Bears pro shop after they lost the game? The minds of sports fans will remain a mystery to me, as I spent Sunday afternoon enjoying a nearly deserted health club (thank you, YouTube!).