Oct. 30, 2003
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The meteoric rise in Internet traffic has swept up Boilermaker fans and other visitors to purduesports.com, which recorded more than 3 million page views in September.
It marked the first time the official intercollegiate athletics site of the Purdue Boilermakers exceeded 3 million views -- 3.3 million to be precise. The figure also represents significant increases in traffic compared with September 2002 and 2001. Page views for the month in 2002 registered 1.9 million and in 2001, 849,000.
Through 30 days in October, the site had recorded 3.1 million page views.
Purdue partners with the Official College Sports Network for Web hosting. September also marked the first time the site cracked the "top 10" in OCSN page views. In August, purduesports.com ranked 24th.
Among other OCSN schools are Ohio State, Notre Dame, North Carolina, Clemson, Florida State and Georgia. Those same institutions, in order, exceeded Purdue page views for September. The balance of the top 10 consisted of North Carolina State, Michigan State and Tennessee.
Other statistics about purduesports.com browsers in September: 203,271 unique visitors logged on for 467,416 visits. They spent an average of 40 seconds per page, and the average number of pages viewed per visit was seven.
Although September saw Boilermaker soccer, cross country, volleyball and football teams making headlines, purduesports.com traffic tended to peak with football Saturdays.
On Sept. 6, opening day at Ross-Ade Stadium, 21,000 fans who couldn't get to the game viewed 530,000 pages. Two weeks later, as Arizona came to town and fans welcomed the Boilermakers "back in black," 18,974 fans browsed 712,000 pages.
In October, the top viewing day was Oct. 11, when Penn State was in town. That day, 14,325 fans loaded 546,435 pages.