The Official Site of the 2002 Open Championship (www.opengolf.com) broke all previous records, attracting 1.8 million unique visitors and generating over 229 million page views, according to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club.
Unique visitors increased over 200% and page views roughly doubled from the records set for the 2001 Championship.
Angus Farquhar, R&A commercial secretary, said “The R&A are extremely pleased with the operational success of opengolf.com this year and delighted to have achieved such high levels of user traffic and positive feedback. Our official web site allowed golf enthusiasts around the world to keep up-to-date with all the latest news, match action and player scores from this year’s Open Championship.”
Unique visitors spent an average of 35 minutes on the site. The main draw was the real-time desktop leader board, where the average user session duration was dramatically higher. Fans were able to “lock” the desktop applet on-screen to follow up-to-the-minute hole-by-hole coverage of their favourite players. Fans could also view extensive video coverage including match highlights and player interviews as well as live web cam coverage from selected holes.
Other popular features on the site included a hole-by-hole guide by Nick Faldo illustrated with detailed plans and overviews from helicopter-mounted cameras.
R&A www.RandA.org