Super Bowl Sends Net Traffic Soaring

http://news.excite.com/news/r/010130/12/net-superbowl-ratings-dc

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The number of people logging on to the official Super Bowl Web site, Superbowl.com, soared 269 percent on the day of the game, according to Internet audience measurement service Nielsen/NetRatings.

About 359,000 unique visitors logged on to the site on Sunday, compared to 97,000 visitors the day before, Nielsen/NetRatings said. It said that hour-by-hour traffic jumped in the fourth quarter of the game with 16 percent of all visitors logging on during that time to vote for the Super Bowl’s most valuable player.

In Sunday’s Super Bowl XXXV, the Baltimore Ravens crushed the New York Giants with a 34-7 score in a game that was watched by a total of about 131 million people in the United States.

Nielsen/NetRatings also said that the number of dot-com companies advertising during the game fell by a whopping 40 percent over last year’s game while traditional brick and mortar advertisers rose 18 percent.

“This is 180 degree different from the Super Bowl last year,” Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services at NetRatings told Reuters.

Only three Internet companies ran advertisements in the Super Bowl this year — Web broker E+Trade (EGRP) and recruitment sites HotJobs.com (HOTJ) and Monster.com, a unit of TMP Worldwide (TMPW) — compared with 17 dot-com advertisers a year ago.

Super Bowl ad veterans PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) and Anheuser-Busch Cos. (BUD) dominated Sunday’s advertising spots.

“There really wasn’t anything that had a Web dimension,” Weiner said of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads. “They were more focusing on the actual product.”