• by Masha Geller , June 23, 2002

Not only did Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open, he drove more than half a million people to the web.

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that the official PGA Tour website jumped 81% in traffic during the week ending June 16, as Web surfers at work flocked online for the latest coverage of the 102 U.S. Open golf tournament held that week.

More than 624,000 unique surfers accessed the site, as compared to 345,000 surfers the prior week. Visitors spent more than 30 minutes on the site and accessed 12.3 million page views, skyrocketing 123% and 195%, respectively, from the week prior.

The top Web pages accessed featured score cards, tournament schedules and leader boards for the U.S. Open and other various golf tournaments.

"Surfers jumped online as the U.S. Open drew to a close, proving that the Web was not immune to 'Tiger-Mania'," said Patrick Thomas, senior Internet analyst at NetRatings. "With major sporting events scheduled for this summer, we can expect that fans will continue to flock to the Web for up-to-the-minute sporting news, statistics and team standings."

Elsewhere on the web, AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google continued to be the most popular properties with both at-home and at-work audiences last week.

The average at-home surfer went online 7 times, spending just over 3 hours and 32 minutes surfing. At work, the average surfer went online 13 times, spending almost 7 hours and 23 minutes surfing. The average duration of a page viewed is about 55 seconds. The current U.S. Internet Universe, according to NetRatings, is 166.5 million at-home users and 48.8 million at-work users.