In the latest sign of fantasy sports’ ability to swim in the mainstream, Compete.com released last month some stats on the Web habits of fantasy players.

Compete drew results from a panel of “more than 2 million” Internet users based in the United States for the month of September, compiling numbers on daily reach, search habits and time spent on various fantasy sites.

The fantasy sports subdomain on Yahoo! and the games subdomain ESPN.com, respectively, came out as the clear top two in unique visitors, each more than doubling the next ranked URL. Worthy of note, however, is that NFL.com’s fantasy area came in third, even if you were to combine the results for each of the three ranked CBS Sports subdomains (football, baseball and college football).

Streak.espn.go.com led the way in average stay, checking in at nearly 5 minutes more than No. 2 fantasy.nfl.com. That URL, of course, takes surfers to ESPN’s Beat the Streak game, which won a Fantasy Sports Trade Association award for 2009. FleaFlicker.com and fantasy.foxsports.com followed in that category.

RTSports.com led the way in visits per person for the month at 20.56. Only two other sites beat Compete.com’s overall tally for the category (14.71): baseball.cbssports.com and myfantasyleague.com.

Other data points drawn into focus in the Compete.com release were:

– Unique visitor numbers don’t tell the entire story. Fantasysports.yahoo.com was the top site for UVs in September (6,115,530) but “attention” increased 130 percent — still not bad, while fantasy.nfl.com attention increase by 370 percent. Perhaps the increased focus on video at fantasy.nfl.com is behind its relatively higher attention.

– For search, ESPN was the clear winner for September. It captured three of the top five search-share positions: “espn” was the number one keyword sending traffic to the fantasy category, “espn fantasy football” was the number two keyword and “espn.com” was number four.

– Fantasy players drop off as the season wanes. Baseball.cbssports.com, which reached its season high in April of 516,761 UVs, was down to 347,416 in September with attention down (44 percent) and visits per person down (25 percent) from August. It’s likely that many players lose interest as they move out of contention and content related to the next fantasy season emerges (football, hockey and basketball). Wise brands should track these trends and use the insights to drive campaign creative and media buying.

More results can be found in the table below …

A while back, Nando Di Fino wrote in The Wall Street Journal about how fantasy could be a key to growing the popularity of professional beach volleyball. Now, the tour just might be one step closer.

On Jan. 22, the Association of Volleyball Professionals — the country’s only pro beach volleyball tour — launched a new website with the help of Digitaria. According to the press release from Digitaria, “fantasy games” will be among the offerings of this new online presence.

The site is being rolled out in pieces, and the fantasy section doesn’t appear to be one of the pieces available at this point. The current lineup beyond the homepage consists of the tour schedule up through late February and a news section.

It’s a shame that the games aren’t yet available, particularly in light of the announcement. AVP events are taking place, and it would seem to be a good chance to try to take advantage of a little publicity. That said, it’s not exactly equivalent to the NFL kicking off in September with no central fantasy operators running. There will be time for interested players to catch on if the AVP can market properly.

Digitaria could offer some more help on that front, as the new volleyball site coincides with the introduction of a new sports division within the digital media company. Digitaria has experience with the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Ravens among others.

The site itself is quite attractive and appears to be easy to navigate. We’ll have to see what comes of it as other new features are added. The press release seems to focus on enhancing the experience of the AVP’s fans, but if the new business partners hope to capitalize on the most recent Olympic gold medal for the U.S. women and satisfy a pretty decent list of sponsors — including Bud Light, McDonald’s, Nature Valley and Gatorade — they’ll have to grow that audience.

According to a Compete.com snapshot, site traffic for avp.com hovered around 20,000 at the beginning of last year before spiking to 70,000 in August — when the Olympics were going on. Afterward, things quieted back down.

The pretty Web pages are a start, but attractive, enjoyable fantasy games sure would help a lot more. Just look at what FLW Outdoors was able to do with its fantasy fishing contest last year.