Your SJA website, sportsjournalists.co.uk, broke all previous records last month, the Beijing Olympics boosting website traffic as more people read more articles on the site than any previous month since its re-launch two years ago.
The SJA’s coverage of the Olympic deeds of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, VIP Olympic spectators like George W Bush, Boris Johnson and Henry Kissinger, the medal-winning efforts of Team GB and the goings-on in the Beijing MPC and media village, saw the site receive 645,291 “hits” in August, an average of nearly 21,000 every day throughout the month.
In all, the site had 47,000 unique visitors during the month, an average of more than 1,500 per day.
There was even a record for a single day’s traffic on the website, with more than 33,000 hits being received on August 19, from 2,300 visits.
Overall this represents a 20-fold increase in website traffic compared to the figures generated before the re-launch in July 2006.
In August, sportsjournalists.co.uk featured a daily blog from the MPC in Beijing, written by SJA chairman Barry Newcombe, with contributions from Philip Barker and Leo Mason.
This was followed up by a series of reflections written by some of leading journalists, including James Lawton, Richard Williams and Patrick Collins.
The previous record month for website traffic was in March this year, coinciding with the SJA’s annual British Sports Journalism Awards, when the site exceeded 500,000 hits in one calendar month for the first time.
With gathering interest in British sport in the build-up to the 2012 Olympics, and a seemingly ever-growing number of people wanting to make sports writing, photography or broadcasting their profession, the
increase in traffic on the SJA’s website seems likely to be an on-going trend.
With SJA members voting for their Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year, and all of Britain’s Beijing medallists invited to attend the 60th annual SJA Sports Awards in London on November 26, the “Olympic effect” could continue for several months yet.
Read some of the SJA’s Beijing Olympic blogs:
Click here to read: Posh and Becks, Pearly Queens, privet and umbrellas
Click here to read: Focus now shifts from the Bird’s Nest to Stratford
Click here to read: Jowell – Beijing has taken Games to a new level
Click here to read: What’s Chinese for “Six blank receipts please?”
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