• Internet Sites Take the Gold With Performance and Availability Averages of More Than 99 Percent
• Mobile Web Sites Capture Silver with Performance Averaging No Less Than 96 Percent
• Sites Measured Included Sports-Focused Outlets, Major News Portals and Worldwide Sponsors of the 2008 Olympics

Keynote Competitive Research, the industry analysis group of Keynote (Nasdaq:KEYN), today announced the results of its analysis surrounding the speed and reliability of Mobile and Internet sites central to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games. While the Web sites monitored - including 12 of the worldwide Olympics sponsors and 15 sites dedicated to Olympics information and news – scored nearly “perfect 10s,” the five mobile news and sports sites faltered.

Among the Internet sites, US Track and Field was the gold medalist, ranking first in performance and second in availability. In contrast, the Reuters Olympics’ site was the disappointment in these games; it encountered an almost 100 percent slowdown beginning on August 16, while at the same time, the availability of the site began to drop to almost 94 percent and hovered around 96 percent until the closing ceremonies. During some of these times, the site would have either been completely unavailable or specific page elements (e.g. ads, images, etc.) would not have loaded.

“The Olympics is always one of the biggest, most watched events on a global scale and the 2008 Beijing Games had a record-breaking number of viewers,” said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. “The world was not only turning to their television sets for the latest, but leveraging the Web. It’s encouraging to see that organizations took the appropriative steps before the games to ensure their sites could provide an optimal experience to end users eager to follow their favorite athlete or learn more about the latest scandal.”

On the mobile Web side, the Olympics-devoted portals of NBC and Yahoo experienced a few fouls, with the average availability of NBC at 95 percent and Yahoo at 92 percent. CNN’s main portal took the gold with 97 percent availability, with ESPN and MSN sharing silver with 96 percent availability.

“Mobile Web sites such as Yahoo’s Olympic portal saw significant drops in availability once the games began compared to measurements taken earlier in the month,” said Nisheeth Mohan, mobile product manager at Keynote.