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15 September 2005 - Online cricket spikes show internet sport watching rampant, SciVisum Finds

…Internet sport now a mainstream trend, as Britain watches with baited breath…

Britain’s Ashes triumph saw a huge surge in website traffic that shows ’watching’ sport at work is now a mainstream trend, according to research by web testing specialists SciVisum.

“The Ashes games have revealed a new mainstream trend - the UK is now using the Internet to watch sport at work,” said Deri Jones, CEO, SciVisum. “The biggest spikes occurred on Friday lunchtime when England began to play, and then throughout Monday as the UK's internet population watched England seize the lead.”

“We monitored the user experience in terms of speed of delivery of UK’s top sporting sites throughout the Ashes and significant slow-downs, during the weekday games revealed the traffic peaks- with particularly big surges occurring just prior to the games commencing each day as users logged on to 'watch' the games.”

“But site performance was as fast at the weekends as the overnight quiet periods, reflecting much reduced traffic volumes then. Our conclusion is that the Internet is now widely being used to 'watch' at work, whereas TV and radio are the medium of choice at the weekends,” said Jones.

Friday afternoon and Monday were particularly busy, with many sites slowing due to the surge in demand, including BBC Online, Channel 4 and the Guardian. The most affected on Friday was the Guardian Online website, running up to 30 times slower than usual, for a sizeable percentage of the samples taken.

Cricketing website CricInfo was the most swamped on Monday, running slow for much of the office hours - more than 20 times slower than usual and showing constant activity. Channel 4 was the next most affected, running four times slower than usual, but better after 11am than before.

Both the BBC and Sky maintained a good service throughout despite being hit by a number of peaks, especially on Monday afternoon.

Jones continues, “Good engineering practise was observed at most of the cricket score pages, which were configured to automatically update every 2 minutes. Although this does incur increased server load (the pages are un-necessarily uploaded even if the PC user is no longer at their desk to watch the scores), it does give a better experience for users as a site slows - because the user is no longer 'clicking and waiting', they don't notice how long the update process takes each time. (unless page delivery becomes so poor that they notice pages stuck for some time in half complete status, with the spinning globe in the corner busy).

“Our User Journey approach to web monitoring gives hard evidence of what visitors on these websites experienced when they make use of the services offered,” explains Jones. “Of course, without further information it can't provide complete root causes of why a particular journey offered poor performance at a particular moment. For example, some of the slow down measured could conceivably have been caused by infrastructure changes to the web portals that coincidentally happened this week - but it's unlikely that these major sports sites would have planned such changes knowing the Ashes game was scheduled!”

According to the Financial Times, the overall volume of shares traded on the London stock markets was down at 2.4bn from the usual 3bn as TV monitors across the City were switched to the cricket.

SciVisum monitored the following websites' sporting sections throughout the Ashes series: BBC Online, Guardian, Sky News, Channel 4 news, and CricInfo.

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Note to editors

More details on the specific spikes and website affected are available, including images.