3rd day in a row: Herald Online in world top 25 Olympic sites

For 3 days running the Herald Online's Olympic News, www.nzherald.co.nz/olympics, has made it onto the global Nielsen//NetRatings 'Web Olympics Index' short-list, ranking among the top 25 Olympic-related sites in the world (see table below).

"This is a great result for the Herald because New Zealand is a relatively minor player in terms of the number of Internet connections in the country so to be up there alongside the major US Japanese European and Asian Olympic sites is really significant," said Brian Milnes, Managing Director - Pacific, for AC Nielsen eRatings.com.

"The Herald's success attests to the site's own pulling power, and to the very high level of enthusiasm for the Games among New Zealanders. What we are seeing here is how, despite our relatively small population, a good New Zealand website is showing up alongside international heavyweights in building a strong following," added Kerry Hawkins, Director of Sales and Marketing for AC Nielsen eRatings.com.

Wilson and Horton Interactive Marketing Manager Tania McCulloch said: "www.nzherald.co.nz is a hugely successful site for us and, to Wilson and Horton Interactive, this is like achieving Olympic Gold. We are delighted to see our pure news site rewarded with such market interest. We have tremendous loyalty from a strong user base and it's exciting for the team here to see more people discovering the quality and news functions available at Herald Online.

"Achieving this rating 3 days running really underlines the success of our strategy to lead online with excellent news content leveraging off the award winning journalism at the NZ Herald."

This success though demands significant technical support from Wilson and Horton Interactive. "The amount of data we are serving has gone up by about 60 per cent since the start of The Olympics," said Patrick Van Rinsvelt, Technical Manager of Wilson and Horton Interactive.

He continued: "Because we are a news site, big stories impact on our traffic pretty quickly. We've seen that a number of times, for example with Fiji. But the Olympics traffic surge is on a whole new level. Fiji saw a traffic spike, on three or four days, however the Olympics driven data demands have been consistent since the opening ceremony."

The Herald site traffic increase has demanded an all-stops-out response from Van Rinsvelt and his team.

"We put a new server online on Sunday and as a result we've seen a significant performance increase today, with greater efficiency and available resources for nzherald.co.nz.

"The challenge for us is in capacity planning. The uptake of the internet among New Zealanders and their hunger for quality news means the month on month growth for nzherald.co.nz just keeps on exceeding even our most optimistic traffic forecasts," he said.

The most popular Olympics-related web domains surfed globally from home:

1 nbcolympics.com

2 sports.yahoo.7

3 olympics.com

4 sportsillustrated.cnn

5 usatoday.com

6 sports.yahoo.co

7 nikkansports.com

8 nhk.or.jp

9 foxsports.com

10 sportingnews.com

11 aftonbladet - Swedish newspaper featuring Olympics

12 dif.dk - Danish Olympic Committee site

13 examiner.ie - Irish

14 fanmail.olympic.ibm.com - Fanmail

15 fr.sports.yahoo.com - French site within Yahoo!

16 gamesinfo.com.au - Australian transport/schedules

17 ireland.com - Irish Times newspaper

18 iltalehti.fi - Finnish Olympic information

19 Jo.wanadoo.fr - French Olympic information

20 news.bbc.co.uk - BBC

21 nzherald.co.nz - New Zealand Herald newspaper

22 olympiaden.nu - Swedish Olympics site

23 olympic.org - Official IOC site

24 opasia.dk - Danish site focusing on Olympics

25 silly2000.com - Parody of official Olympics site