RIYADH, 30 March 2003 — Web traffic originating from the Kingdom has soared to an all-time high at news, government and political and anti-war websites since the war broke out last week.
“The number of people logging on to the Internet has multiplied,” said Ahmad Al-Khalifa, an Internet cafe owner. The number of people visiting the web’s top news sites ran at more than twice the usual rate, according to other experts, who have been monitoring Internet use in the Kingdom.
Globally, more people have been hitting more anti-war websites. On average, the three leading protest sites (www.antiwar.com; www.unitedforpeace.org; www.stopwar. org.uk) drew 160 percent more traffic than they did four weeks ago.
A Marines Corps site (www.marines.com) experienced the biggest increase with 411 percent, said Ahmad. He said that the at-work audience in Saudi Arabia has jumped substantially.
“Without a doubt, people are glued to their web browsers for virtually minute-by-minute updates of the war as it unfolds,” said a Pakistani expatriate Haleem Shah, adding that there has been sharp increase in the hits on Riyadh-based websites also. Yahoo.com was among the sites whose numbers skyrocketed — the volume of traffic to its news section jumped 600 percent last Thursday, he said.
The amount of free audio and video accessed rose tenfold in the Kingdom. The same was true in the case of the United States and some European countries, he said. Some of the largest traffic increases occurred at the web counterparts to broadcast and cable television networks. This increase was attributable partly to the TV networks promotion of their own websites.
An Indian executive working in Riyadh told Arab News he preferred to log on to India-based sites like ndtv.com to find out more about India’s official position on the war.
The data suggest that people are moving from watching their favorite networks on TV at home to viewing them on the web once they get to work. Among TV networks, FoxNews.com saw the biggest jump, up 218 percent last Thursday over its average traffic for the past four weeks, according to ComScore, an organization which monitors Internet use. CBSNews.com was next, with an increase of 207 percent, followed by CNN.com, up 200 percent.
On Thursday, CNN.com had the most traffic of all the news sites: Nine million visitors. MSNBC was next with 6.8 million. Al-Jazeera TV was not included in the survey.
A few military sites were hard to access at times last week, especially the US Army’s official site (www.army.mil). Some IT companies, news organizations and political establishments plan to expand their website’s capacity before traffic grows further.
