Barring an "unforeseen piece of breaking news that
pushes traffic through the roof," NBCOlympics.com, a joint
venture of NBC Sports and Quokka, will "fall short" of the
10 million unique visitors projected before the games began,
according to Staci Kramer of INSIDE.com. But Quokka Sports
CEO Alan Ramadan said, "I'm very comfortable that we're
going to be able to meet our impression guarantees to our
sponsors." Andrea Ching, a media buyer for Ameritrade,
supported Ramadan's assessment. Ching: "Things are tracking
relatively well. I'm not anticipating being in a make-good
position at this point." Kramer wrote that the site "will
be lucky to total eight million users," and while those
numbers "have been deemed a disappointment by some critics,
many ad buyers still view the effort as a success."
Mediacom's Jon Mandel: "Eight million is a decent-size
country." SFX Sports Group Senior VP Peter Hughes, whose
company is an NBC Web advertiser, said, "If I'm a sponsor
and I'm evaluating this relationship, I say you missed your
uniques but the numbers have been pretty good. I'd give it
probably a B, B+" (INSIDE.com, 9/28). USA TODAY's Mike
Snider reports that the "top-drawing" athlete in chats on
NBCOlympics.com has been Lance Armstrong, "who had 14,500
fans log onto his chat Wednesday night" (USA TODAY, 9/29).
ONE LESSON: The WALL STREET JOURNAL's McKee & Weber
write, "As the Games wind down, it's clear the Web fell
short of its potential." The "flaw" can be traced to "the
IOC's policy of banning audio and video clips online.
Understandably, the [IOC] want to guard those lucrative TV
rights. But does anyone believe that the ratings were
threatened by Web video?" (WALL ST JOURNAL, 9/29).
QUOKKA'S SPIN MOVE? For its Olympics coverage, Quokka
"invested millions of dollars in an XML-based content
management system it calls the Quokka Sports Platform," and
Ramadan said the company "is considering spinning it off
into its own company" (Upside.com, 9/28).
