• by March 1, 2002

Jupiter Media Metrix and Mercury Interactive, which monitored web traffic and site performance during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games for all major Olympics websites, are reporting that while the number of daily unique visitors to NBCOlympics.com far exceeded the traffic to any of the others, the site suffered from relatively weak technical performance.

Media Metrix data revealed that traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked at slightly over two million unique visitors on February 21st, while CNNSI.com's Olympics channel and SaltLake2002.com vied for second and third places with 683,000 and 666,000 unique visitors, respectively.

Mercury Interactive data show that during this time NBCOlympics.com averaged a nine second URL response time, compared with the seven second response time averaged by all other websites.

According to Mercury Interactive's data, the overall average availability of URLs on the Olympics websites monitored was 99.2%, with only 6% of web pages taking longer than eight seconds to download.

When measuring sample transactions on the sites -- which include adding items to a cart, logging in and checking out -- Mercury found that only 95% of transactions were available and a whopping 13% took more than eight seconds to complete. While URL performance and availability is much improved over previous years of Olympic site performance, transaction times remain problematic.

Nevertheless, according to this week's Jupiter Media Metrix report, competition and controversy helped the Olympics maintain momentum right through the final week of the games and closing ceremonies this past Sunday. Average daily unique visitors to NBC and Salt Lake Olympic Committee sites increased versus the prior three-week average: NBColympics.com was up 104% to 811,000; Olympics.com was up 83% to 292,000; and SaltLake2002.com was up 62% to 342,000 average daily visitors.

Elsewhere on the web, the unveiling of new auto models and continued deals on financing helped drive visitors to auto-related sites this car-buying season. While not the largest auto site, Autoweb.com drew the largest increase in average daily visitors, climbing 75% over its prior three-week average to 66,000. A few auto manufacturers’ sites also increased in traffic: Toyota.com was up 58%, Chevrolet.com was up 19% and Ford.com was up 15%.

Additionally, despite some well-publicized failures in the arena of home food delivery via the Web, a few companies are still trying and a few have been gaining ground: Pizza maker Papa Johns lets customers order online at Papajohns.com and the site recorded a 192% spike in traffic. It had 62,000 average daily visitors last week. Also, convenience-food delivery service Schwan’s saw traffic to its site rise. Schwans.com increase 38% o 66,000 average daily visitors.

As usual, AOL and Yahoo! had the strongest showings, appearing in the top ten in nearly every category tracked by JMM.