As sports events go, the soccer World Cup has no equal: it's a month-long tournament that draws the attention of hordes of fans from all over the world.
The trick, as always for Internet firms, is to find a way to cash in on the frenzy.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"Amazon has its Christmases. For us, this is 10 Christmases rolled into one," said Tom Jessiman, managing director of London-based specialist news site Sports.com, adding a strong showing by one of the big European nations would help to ensure that its investment on the tournament pays off.
The technological stamp on this year's event will be clear. Some Internet executives are calling the tournament the first "Internet World Cup" as tens of millions of fans are expected to log on daily to check scores, stats and commentary.
News vendors are also planning to offer updates to mobile phone handsets via the text messaging services which have become so popular since the last World Cup four years ago.
Sites covering the tournament will have one major advantage over France in 1998 -- the time difference from the venue in South Korea and Japan.
Matches will be held during the start of the working day in Europe and in the middle of the night in North America and South America, making the Internet a preferred medium to keep on top of the action, online executives believe.
Reuters itself is sending a team of 190, the news agency's largest ever contingent for a World Cup event, to cover all 64 games of the tournament.
The company is one of many major media organisations that intends to send updates from missed penalty kicks to red cards to fans via the Net and mobile phones.
Some relative newcomers to sport are trying to exploit the hype too. German ISP T-Online will run live chats, replete with video, of the German national team during the tournament. And British rival Freeserve has purchased a Reuters news feed that includes live results.
San Francisco-based online firm Quokka Sports bet its future on the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and lost. Saddled with enormous debt from covering the event, the NASDAQ-listed firm went bust a few months after the close of the Games.
The name "Quokka" is spoken in hushed tones in sports circles these days. It's become a reminder that building and maintaining sites that can accommodate millions of fans is a costly venture, one that cannot be entirely funded by advertising and sponsorships.
US Internet company Yahoo says it has learned from the harsh lessons of Quokka. In partnership with world soccer governing body FIFA, Yahoo has built the official site FifaWorldCup.Yahoo.com.
"We would not have entered this relationship if we had the view that it wouldn't become profitable," Fru Hazlitt, European sales and marketing director at Yahoo, told Reuters. "The plan is to break even on this, and if possible, to make some money."
To that end, Yahoo has introduced an Internet first: the company is charging fans US$19.95 to view video highlights, delayed by three hours, of all 64 matches.
The lion's share of revenues is still in the form of advertising from companies such as MasterCard, Anheuser-Busch and Motorola. Sponsorship deals on the site run as high as US$1 million, officials said.
Hazlitt said she expects the site to register four billion to five billion page views, or more than three times the traffic the official site registered for the last tournament in 1998. Keynote Systems, a US technology firm that measures Web site performance, warned that even the most popular Web sites have been slowed by huge surges in traffic.
A technological hiccup though will be of little consolation to a fan desperate to catch the score of the England-Argentina match. They'll move on to another site, no doubt, and may never return -- a price no Web site operator can absorb.
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