Olympic Web is no match for TV

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by The Industry Standard staff writers

(IDG) -- The Olympic Games started out with a splash -- but not online. The number of home surfers visiting NBCOlympics.com increased to 432,900, a jump of 159 percent from Friday to Saturday, the first day of the games, 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.

As might be expected, general sports and news sites benefited from the Games. 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.

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Although the Web traffic figures are up slightly from pre-Games levels, these increases certainly aren't amazing. NBC's television coverage is not drawing the audience it expected either. Whether it's because of the 15-hour time difference with Sydney, the lack of live coverage or competition from football games, Americans simply may not be as interested in the Olympics this year as in year's past.

And whether or not the Olympics sites can maintain the traffic levels of the first few days of competition remains to be seen. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com on Sunday dropped 3.3 percent, while traffic to Olympics.com dropped 4.1 percent. Quokka co-founder and CEO Alan Ramadan expects that NBCOlympics.com will receive from 20 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 Sept. 10-16, according to Web traffic researcher PC Data -- but that was before the games were in full swing.

The increased Web traffic even had a negative effect on the performance of Olympics sites. On Saturday, the first day of competition, Olympics.com was unavailable from 8 p.m. to midnight PST, 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, Keynote Systems.

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

Web audiences remain minuscule compared with 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. While 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.

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