Who Is No. 1 On The Internet? Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer

Roger Federer was World No. 1 on the courts for a record 237 weeks.

Now it is Rafael Nadal's turn at the top of the heap, which he has now ruled for an impressive 34 weeks.

But who is number one on the internet? I thought it would be interesting to compare and choose a winner—here are my humble results:

1) Official Websites 

Rafael Nadal's official website is in two languages, English and Spanish. Funnily, that omits Rafa's own native tongue, Catalán, but these two languages surely cover the needs of the vast majority of his fans.

The "home" page is rather a jumble, with the three column format and mixture of big white block text, animated images, photos and body articles making it visually challenging to absorb.

But the designer's decision to limit the template colours to shades of black and white, and the wealth of multimedia treasures makes the site a delight for fans willing to spend a little time getting to know their way around.

The front page features a nice news column on the left hand side which seems to be updated frequently with interesting news from Rafa, results and stories. There's a great multimedia presentation in the centre, with background music and stylised Rafa-shot-making which warms the heart as we are informed of his career highlights and other tidbits.

Rafa's "Blog" and "Ask Him" give fans a chance to get a direct communication hot-line with the King of Clay, and are nice touches, though these sections only seem to be updated sporadically (personally I am happy that he focuses on tennis!)

The forum is lively in several languages, lightly but diligently moderated and with a tight community of doting "Rafanatics".

Good: frequent news updates, direct involvement by Rafa, forum, multimedia

Bad: hard to navigate, cluttered appearance, blog updated sporadically

Roger Federer's official website is in three languages, English, French and German.

Whereas Rafa's sight is high impact, Roger has gone for a much more elegant approach. Funny that :).

The site template is a strange selection of orange/brown hues - strange because if anything the colour makes one think of clay courts and the one Grand Slam that Federer does not yet own, rather than more logical choices such as the red and white of Switzerland, his white suited elegance, or perhaps even the green of the Wimbledon courts he dominated for so many years.

The capped font used in the site title and headers is, to put it simply, dated - more characteristic of 80's computer nerdery than a classy 21st century tennis giant.

But these quibbles aside, the site is well organised, easy to navigate and content rich. There is a well-maintained tour schedule, comprehensive results page and the "fan zone" is great, with a lively and delightfully sycophantic forum, and lots of great pics and videos.

The widget in the top level showing weather and local time at the current tournament location is a nice touch

Good: Great organisation, rich fan content, easy to navigate and find what you want. Very comprehensive results and statistics

Bad: Strange colour selection, outdated and small font

2) Site Popularity

There are a few ways we could measure the popularity of each tennis player on the web, but I decided to break this down into "site popularity", ie how popular are each of their websites, and "search popularity" ie how often are their names searched and found on the internet.

Let's look at site popularity first, and I must state outright that without having access to server statistics, there is a bit of guesswork involved here.

Let's look at a couple of possible proxies:

Alexa 

As you can see in this graph, Alexa.com shows Roger as the clear winner. Alexa depends upon people installing their browser tool bar to collect stats, and it is open to some contention, but the breadth of Federer's lead here suggests that his site has many more visits than Nadal's.

Registered Users 

Federer's site shows 226,285 registered users. Rafa's site does not ask for registration for the main web, but the forum has just 2,307 users, so I kind of think we have to give this one to Roger too.

3) Search Popularity

Of course, the official websites and visits to them are just a tiny part of the big internet picture.

There are thousands of sites out there with content to related to both players, and millions of fans looking for that content each day. So who are they looking for most?

Google, of course, is a great place to start: 

Googletrends

This compares the volume of searches for Roger Federer with those for Rafael Nadal over the last 12 months.

What is immediately apparent is that searches for Rafa and Roger go hand in hand. A true representation of how the rivalry of these players has evolved in tandem.

But what is not immediately apparent is that this figure scales the search volume for "Roger Federer" by a factor of 1.3 to one - this means that there are still 30% more searches for the Swiss great than the Spaniard.

Wikirank

Wikirank is a relatively new tool that lets us compare the number of web visits to the wikipedia sites of Roger and Rafa respectively. Once again, Roger wins hands down. See Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal on Wikirank

And the Winner is... Roger Federer is No. 1 on the Internet!

Roger Federer may be number two on the court right now, but at least in cyberspace he still has the better of Rafael Nadal.

His official site is better, with more visitors, and he is more sought after in search engines than the Spaniard. Let's remember that he has the advantage of time, and we can perhaps expect that momentum is moving in Rafa's favour.

We also have to consider that the Internet tends to favour the English language, and Nadal's fan base is undoubtedly less Anglo and more Spanish.

But there is a clear winner, congratulations Roger.

P.S. Just one final note to edify those Nadal-lovers who might feel hard done by: When it comes to image searches, 18 people search for pics of hunky Rafa for every 15 searches for sartorial Roger!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full disclosure - The author is quietly a big Rafa Nadal fan, but tries in vain to appear neutral in his capacity as webmaster for the Nadal vs. Federer fan site: www.nadalversusfederer.com