Olympic Sites Miss Gold

Number of visitors pales in comparison to those watching games on television.

Laura Carr, The Industry Standard

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The number of surfers visiting NBCOlympics.com increased to 432,900, a jump of 159 percent from Friday to Saturday, according to Web ratings firm Nielsen NetRatings. Similarly, traffic to the official International Olympic Committee Web site, Olympics.com, jumped 152 percent to reach a total of 221,800 unique visitors Saturday.

Although the traffic figures are up slightly from pre-Olympics levels, they remain minuscule compared to the figures for national television audiences. According to NBC Sports Research, 56 million Americans tuned in to NBC to watch the Opening Ceremony in Sydney. Although that turnout is far fewer than the 84 million Americans who tuned in for the 1996 Opening Ceremony in Atlanta, it nonetheless makes Sydney's Opening Ceremony the most-watched non-U.S. Summer Olympics opener in history.

An eye-popping 111 million people tuned in to the Games on Sunday, making it NBC's highest-rated Sunday since Game 6 of the NBA finals in 1998--Michael Jordan's last professional game. Another way of looking at it is that 267 times more pairs of eyeballs gazed on the tube than on the equivalent Web site. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com on Sunday dropped 3.3 percent, while that to Olympics.com dropped 4.1 percent.

The Race Slows

Whether the Olympic sites can maintain the traffic levels of the first few days of competition remains to be seen. Alan Ramadan, cofounder and chief executive officer of the online sports network Quokka.com, expects that NBCOlympics.com will receive from 20 million to 30 million visitors during the course of the Games. That goal may be lofty. The site had only 1.3 million unique visitors between September 10 and 16, according to Web traffic researcher PC Data, but that was before the games were in full swing. (See "Let the Web Games Begin.")

As might be expected, general sports and news sites benefited from the Olympics. Traffic to sports sites overall grew 52 percent from Friday to Saturday, while the number of visitors to news and information sites increased 10 percent.

Not Peak Performance

But that increased Web traffic had a negative effect on the performance of Olympic sites. On Saturday, the first day of competition, Olympics.com was unavailable from 8 p.m. to midnight Pacific Time, bringing the average availability of the site within the U.S. down to just 80 percent for the day. By comparison, NBCOlympics.com was available 98 percent of Saturday, according to Internet performance specialists at Keynote Systems.

It was even more difficult to access Olympic sites from outside of the United States. From 50 global cities, Olympics.com had an average download time of more than 6 seconds between the day before the opening ceremonies and Saturday. By contrast, the average download time of Olympics.com within the United States was hovering just over 3 seconds, even during the beginning days of the Olympics.

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