Kiwis go online to support Olympics athletes

Kiwis go online to support Olympics athletes - logging third highest number of messages sent from any country

FanMail - www.ibm.com/fanmail

Total FanMail messages: 203,391

Top countries SENDING FanMail: Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan Top countries RECEIVING FanMail: Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Japan

Eric Moussambani (Equitorial Guinea, swimming) has the 11th highest number of individual FanMail messages.

Public Visits to Darling Harbour IBM Surf Shack: 42, 864

Home pages created: 2871

For further information, contact Jennifer Dell @ IBM NZ on 09 359 8519 or 021 502 196.

IBM INTERNET DAILY HIGHLIGHTS SYDNEY 2000 OLYMPIC GAMES September 21, 2000

Olympic Web Site Traffic (http://www.olympics.com)

Total number of hits to date: 4.4 billion

Hits for Thursday, September 21: 837.6 million

Peak Hits per Minute Thursday, September 21: 823, 478

Olympics.com Traffic Highlights:

? 16.4 million page views were requested to Olympics.com on Wednesday, which brings the total Page Views to date to 76.1 million.

? 4.1 million unique users have visited Olympics.com to date. Over 1.2 million unique users visited the site on Wednesday - each unique user requested an average of 13.4 page views, and spent 17.9 minutes on the site overall.

? Average time on desktop for IBM Real-Time Scoreboards on Wednesday was 29 minutes. The most popular scoreboards were Basketball, Tennis and Volleyball.

? About 25% of unique users visiting pages on each of the top 10 sports on Wednesday were from the USA with the exception of Artistic Gymnastics, where 46% of the unique users were from the USA.

? Judo was the only sport in the top 10 list that didn't appear to appeal to Australians - visitors from USA, Netherlands and Japan dominated the traffic to that sport. The top 10 sports were Swimming, Artistic Gymnastics, Football, Basketball, Tennis, Hockey, Judo, Volleyball, Sailing, and Baseball.

? The most popular athletes on the site on Wednesday were Pieter van den Hoogenband of the Netherlands, Ian Thorpe of Australia, and Eric Moussambani of Equatorial Guinea. van den Hoogenband's popularity was thanks to his countrymen - 34% of the unique users requesting his athlete information were from the Netherlands.

Lisa Herden Program Manager, Worldwide Olympic & Sports Public Relations Ph:1-914-765-4596 Tie Line: 251-4596 Fax: 1-914-765-4620 Tie Line: 251-4620 e-mail: lherden@us.ibm.com

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