Surfing for Oscar Info

  • by March 25, 2002
The Oscar Internet traffic stats are in! Despite lasting a record breaking 4 hours, 23 minutes, last night's Oscar celebration was clearly (and not surprisingly) an event primarily for the airwaves (vs. the Web) with Internet sites measured drawing no more than about 650K visitors worldwide, with most below 500K, according to comScore data.

The tracking firm found that while Internet activity often slows from Saturday to Sunday, Oscar sites measured enjoyed a spike on Oscar Sunday. Oscar.com tripled its audience versus the day before (Saturday) and traffic grew 700% from one week before the Oscar airing.

U.S. surfers favored sites such as ew.com and eonline.com, while official sites oscar.com and oscar.org -- as well as the film resource site imdb.com -- drew more than half of their viewers from elsewhere on the planet, comScore said.

Despite Denzel Washington's Oscar award, he took 4th in Web searches of Best Actor nominees: Russell Crowe, Will Smith, and Tom Wilkinson all preceded Denzel respectively.

By contrast, comScore said, Halle Berry was the undisputed champion not only among actresses, but of any nominated actress (or actor) in online searches.

Lord of the Rings dominated web-related searches across the "Best Film" category nominees, with Moulin Rouge and Beautiful Mind following. However, since Lord of the Rings has such a broad reach in merchandising etc., one could consider Moulin Rouge to be the most popular "pure" film search.

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