The NFL proved it with the Super Bowl. The NBA proved it with the All-Star game. And ESPN is proving it as the NCAA tournament draws near. Big events mean big numbers on the Internet.
"The Internet and big events make a powerful combination," said Jamie Rosenberg, content manager for the NBA's web site.Starwave's SportsZone - which includes ESPNET, as well as the NBA and NASCAR home pages - might now be the all-time record-holder for hits in a single day, exceeding the 6 million the NFL got on Super Bowl Sunday.
On March 4, SportsZone received about 6.3 million hits from an estimated 148,000 users. That's compared to 121,000 users and 4.3 million hits on a single day one month earlier, Starwave said.
Starwave, the web server owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, attributes a lot of its recent growth to greater server capacity and a general growth in the industry.
However, the site also has benefited directly from increased usage of NBA.com, the annual springtime renewal of major league baseball, and increasing interest in college basketball as the tournament nears.
When the NBA site (http://www.NBA.com) made its debut in November, it was averaging 800,000 hits a day. When the NBA's special All-Star section went up, hits climbed as high as 1.2 million, and they've held at slightly over 1 million a day since.
"We gathered steam and climbed dramatically around All-Star time," Rosenberg said. "We've tailed off slightly but kept some of the growth. That's the goal - to create spikes and keep some of the growth."
ESPNET - can be found at
http://ESPNET.SportsZone.com - has been the biggest contributor to SportsZone's growth, and right now baseball and college basketball are the driving forces. ESPNET will sponsor an NCAA tournament pool that begins as soon as the teams are selected on Sunday.
"As far as we can tell, traffic in the college basketball area is up about 40 percent," Starwave marketing director Brian Ratzliffe said.
"We expect this to increase dramatically when the ESPNET SportsZone Tournament Challenge goes live one hour after the teams are selected. We're hoping that up to 20,000 players will play in the four days that the Challenge is open for submissions."
College basketball fans already are coming out of the virtual woodwork.
Tuesday night, ESPNET had a live chat with UCLA's Toby Bailey after a game, and more than 1,300 users were lined up to ask questions.
MISSING LINKS: There's nothing an Internet user hates more than to click to a home page and see the words, "Last Revised When Your Dad Was In Diapers."
In other words, to survive you must be updating and changing constantly. Rosenberg says it's impossible not to change at NBA.com.
"There are basically three different types of content elements we deal with," he said.
"Some of it's planned far in advance," he said, like the All-Star section and "International Week," which the NBA will introduce on March 18 to give the international game some exposure.
Rosenberg calls a second element "the mini-events" like John Stockton's steals record or Lenny Wilkens' 1,000th coaching victory. And a third element includes the site's regular features such as chat, polls, trivia games.
"Among all those, it's impossible not to keep the site constantly refreshed," Rosenberg said. ...
Cross linking is one way in which sites help create interest for each other while providing a service to users. NBA.com, for example, can be accessed from ESPNET, and many other sites include links to other sites with similar of complementary content.
"Of course we like to be linked. Anybody is welcome to offer links to ESPNET SportsZone," SportsZone features editor Mitch Gelman said. "But when we provide links, it's for a very specific reasons that we think will give our users added value."
Gelman said Internet servers must always be careful not to provide links to poor quality sites or sites which can't handle the traffic.
"In some cases, you drive so many people to a site that unless the site can handle the capacity, it can be overwhelmed," he said. "That's a disservice to your users and to the other site." ...
The Mountain Zone Internet site at http://www.mediazones.com will provide a "cybercast" of the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships live from Stratton Mountain, Vt., March 21-24. The cybercast will include both live and recorded video, audio interviews, music, photos and profiles.
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Deseret News spins its own Web site
Sports fans can get up-tothe-minute scores, news and statistics direct from the Deseret News' own Web page. Review staff-produced stories, or click on SportsWire for national and international sports.