The Sydney Olympics have produced yet another world record - the greatest number of visitors to an Internet site for a single event in the history of web communication.
With six days of sport still to go, the official Olympic Games Internet site has already attracted 7.2 billion page impressions, surpassing the original estimate of 6.5 billion and could reach 10 billion. This means the 27th Olympiad is the most popular event ever on the Internet. The Nagano Winter Olympics two years ago attracted 634 million hits, and the 1996 summer Games at Atlanta 187 million.
The site, www.olympics.com, had not crashed at any time despite the incessant world-wide demand, Craig Lowder, a spokesman for Olympics sponsors IBM, said yesterday. The official site has been available from the start of the soccer competition two days before the official Opening ceremony on September 15th. The site aims to provide up-to-the minute results and a spread of information such as biography and performances of individual athletes.
The greater use of the web around the world has meant that anyone at home or in an office could access results almost immediately without waiting for television or radio reports.
Coincidentally, television viewing figures for the Olympics has dropped in the US, which is 15-18 hours behind Australia. With Internet access, American sports fans did not need to wait for pre-recorded programmes on NBC, which has broadcasting rights to the Games.
According to preliminary estimates from Nielsen Media Research, NBC's prime-time package of taped Olympic highlights last Tuesday was watched by just over 15.6 million US households, compared to a reported NBC forecast of between 17.64 and 18.64 million households to its advertisers.
Lowder said one of the attractions of the official site, particularly in the East Coast of the US, was that it provided real-time scores for 11 sports. "When they score in basketball the score changes on the screen," he said.
The same applied to European television stations that were holding back pre-recorded programmes to attract prime-time advertising rates.
