The Super Bowl wasn't a great football game, but it was great for sports Web sites, sending millions of visitors to their sites on Super Bowl Sunday and Monday.
"It was a benchmark year with massive
traffic to online properties via in-game programming," says Christopher Todd, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
During the game, there were many on screen mentions of CBS.Sportsline.com and
SuperBowl.com, an NFL site. There was a contractual agreement between CBS and the NFL that required CBS to mention SuperBowl.com every time it mentioned CBS.Sportsline.com. For the first time, the
sites were mentioned simaltaneously, Todd says.
Other sports sites reported high numbers, too, including SportsLine.com, CNNSI.com, Foxsports.com and ESPN.com, with ESPN getting 1.4 million hits to
lead the way, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
Meanwhile, the three dot.com advertisers on the Super Bowl broadcast also reported high hits. Etrade.com had 526,000 unique visitors, a 47 percent
increase over the previous three weeks. Hotjobs.com had 328,000 visitors and Monster.com had 706,000, increases of 101 and five percent.
- Ken Liebeskind