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sites is building
Hot places to go for backgrounders on athletes
By Marty Beard
Traffic to web sites related to the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is already brisk and gives every indication of increasing through the Games’ duration.
"The 2002 winter Games are off to a nice start, with every indication of being a solid event with web participation," says Nielsen//NetRatings analyst Allen Weiner.
What remains to be seen is whether traffic will surpass that of the 2000 summer Olympics. But early indications suggest it will; traffic to the official web sites for those Games, though billed as the first internet Olympics, attracted just 17 percent of U.S. internet users.
On Saturday, NBCOlympics.com drew some 398,000 unique visitors, according to data from Nielsen//NetRatings, representing a 49 percent increase over Friday, the day of the opening ceremonies.
Also seeing healthy traffic gains is Olympics.com, which received a 58 percent spike in unique visitors between Friday and Saturday. On Sunday the site received more than 311,000 unique visitors, a 117 percent increase over Saturday.
Other Olympics sites that are expected to receive a surge of visitors include the CNN-Sports Illustrated site, the Fox Sports site, the ESPN site, the International Olympic Committee site and the BBC sports site.
Internet traffic will swell as users get more excited about specific sports they are following on TV, says Diane Hagglund, director of product marketing at Mercury Interactive, which is monitoring the performance of web sites that are tied to the Games. "You will see people becoming more engaged throughout the event."
As with the Super Bowl, surfers are logging onto the Olympics sites for statistics and player biographies. Given the length of the Games and the great variety of events, Olympics site visitors will be looking for even more in-depth information.
"The Olympics information on the web will play a complementary role to the daily coverage playing out on television," Weiner says.
"The internet allows surfers to find very specific Olympics-related news when they want, while television broadcast is delivered on a set schedule focusing coverage on the more popular events."
But web surfers going to Olympics web sites can expect to experience some frustrations.
Even the most technologically sophisticated sites can bog down under traffic deluges, as was seen during the Super Bowl, when Mlife.com, AT&T’s new wireless telephone service site, saw a 1,903 percent increase in traffic during the game that overloaded servers, blocking access for many.
"The sites in general held up pretty well during the opening ceremonies, but as we’re moving into the actual Games themselves there have started to be a few performance and availability problems," says Hagglund.
She notes that several Olympics sites are already having problems.
Olympics.org, the IOC’s site, was only available half the time yesterday, and the official SaltLake2002 site was having sporadic availability lapses yesterday afternoon, with one of every 20 attempts to access the site failing.
But overall, Hagglund expects web performance for the 2002 winter Games to exceed that of 2000, with fewer glitches this time around.
"There’s more awareness that the sites are there, and there’s also more awareness from the people putting up the web sites that they have to work if they’re driving people there," Hagglund says.
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Traffic to Olympics-related sites |
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| Site |
Unique Audience Feb. 8 |
Unique Audience Feb. 9 |
Unique Audience Feb. 10 |
Percent growth, Feb. 8-9 |
Percent growth, Feb. 9-10 |
| NBCOlympics.com |
267,000 |
398,004 |
240,987 |
49 |
-10 |
| Olympics.com |
143,127 |
225,581 |
311,080 |
58 |
117 |
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Source: Nielsen//NetRatings |
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February 13, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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