Lara Sinclair | August 14, 2008
SWIMMER Stephanie Rice is setting records online as well as in the pool after edging out fellow Australian Grant Hackett to generate the most popular online video moment from the Beijing Olympics to date.
Rice's first gold medal win in the 400m individual medley on Sunday just pipped Hackett's failure to get a place in the 400m freestyle final as the most streamed competition video in what is shaping as Australia's biggest and most comprehensive online media event yet.More than 400,000 unique browsers a day are going online to access Olympic content, according to official online media partner Yahoo7, which had streamed more than a million videos by Monday (the most recent data available at press time).
While the total Olympic online audience is being split across the usual variety of websites that can report Olympic news, Yahoo7 general manager of media Kath Hamilton said exclusive content such as online video, photo galleries and live results were driving traffic for Yahoo7.
"They're the click magnets," Hamilton said. "People come in the mornings to get a medal update and a schedule of what's on. In the afternoon we see a lot more people watching videos.
"I think we're going to smash any streaming targets we might have set," she said. "We were looking at 3 million at a stretch."
Traffic to the Yahoo7.com.au/olympics website is up 347 per cent since the Games began, while the number of unique visitors to the home page is up 15 per cent.
More than 4 million page views were served up on Monday alone, with that number increasing "exponentially".
Nielsen had no data available on the top local Olympics websites available yesterday but according to Hitwise, Yahoo7 ranked behind sites including the Australian Olympic Team and International Olympic Committee sites, the ABC's Olympics portal, and even Telstra's NextG Mobile Olympics site last week.
That should change this week, Hamilton said, due largely to the portal's tie-in, and promotion on, the Seven Network's television coverage.
"When Seven throws to the website we see an immediate spike (in traffic)," she said.
"Thirty per cent of TV viewers are online at the same time," Hamilton said. "It's certainly being demonstrated that that audience is using the web to give them (extra information)."
Seven warned viewers at the start of its Olympics broadcast not to reproduce any of its content on video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Viewers are largely playing ball, according to Hamilton, even though Yahoo7 has taken the added risk of playing a 30-second pre-roll ad leading into every third video a user plays.
One thing audiences can't do online, however, is stream audio from the Games.
Seven on-sold the broadcast audio rights, but not the streaming rights, to 2GB owner Macquarie Radio in order to protect Seven's TV ratings.
"We're protecting each media rights holder's rights by having audio with 2GB, online with Yahoo7 and TV with Seven and SBS," Seven spokesman Simon Francis said.