Since Howard Stern made the jump to SIRIUS in the beginning of this year, SIRIUS.com traffic has seen a healthy jump in traffic according to a study by Nielsen/NetRatings.

In January, SIRIUS had over 2.3 million visitors to their website, compared to XM which had 1.5 million. In February, SIRIUS' servers were less congested as traffic droped to 1.59 million - maintaining a superior, but nearly equal to XM's number of uniques - 1.58 million. In March, SIRIUS jumped up to 1.9 million, while XM's grew to 1.7 million.

These numbers are significantly higher from 2005's traffic levels, where SIRIUS had a comparitively paltry 666,000 uniques in March of '05 while XM had 1.2 million - an increase of 188% and 47% respectively.

A huge number of people visiting these sites are obviously there to listen to the online streams: For SIRIUS, 44 percent of users logged in to access the streaming feeds; for XM, it was 27 percent.

Return visitors are always an interesting metric to track. It's one thing for people to stumble upon your site, but it's another one entirely to get them coming back. In March, SIRIUS and XM saw an average of 3.5 and 3.7 sessions per person, respectively. The average time spent per person at the SIRIUS site was nearly 15 minutes. At XM, it was just over 13 minutes

[Mediaweek]
[Nielsen/NetRatings Press Release]