Since the start of the FIDE world championship in San Luis, Argentina, our
news page has recorded a steadily rising number of visitors. The Google-powered
traffic ranking site Alexa.com
now consistently ranks ChessBase.com amongst the top 10,000 web sites in the
world (this week's average: 8,547). That reflects a remarkable interest in chess
and in the World Championship in San Luis – an interest that is being
meticulously monitored by the sponsors onsite, by other potential sponsors and
of course by the World Chess Federation FIDE, the organiser of the event.
Let us take a look at the Alexa rankings of chessbase.com for the last two
years:
The graph shows the daily reach per million Internet users in the world. At
the beginning there is a very sharp peak, which some of you may recognize: that
was the Kasparov
vs X3D Fritz match that was staged in New York at the beginning of November
2003. In 2004 you can clearly see Wijk
aan Zee and Linares
making their peaks during the first two months. Then the Dannemann
world championship and the Chess
Olympiad in Calvià in September and October of 2004 caused new bursts
of visitors to the site.
2005 started with Wijk
again, and gained momentum during the Linares
super-GM, which peaked with the announcement of Garry
Kasparov's retirement from competitive chess. A mini jump is seen for the
Sofia
Mobiltel Masters in May, then clear peaks for Dortmund
in July and a flurry of interesting tournaments and news items in August.
All the way to the right you can see the dramatic spike brought on by the World
Championship in San Luis, which started at the end of September and has spawned 30 ChessBase reports so far.
To what can we attribute the remarkable record-breaking success of this
event? A number of factors come to mind:
-
The event was well-publicized in advance, with the event host Governor
Alberto Rodríguez Saá of San Luis, giving us an in-depth
interview and visiting Dresden where he met
with the Prince of Saxony.
-
The organisers provided ample information, including pictures, and didn't
hassle anyone about broadcasting the games live.
-
The tournament turned out to be very exciting, sensationally so, with almost
no unfought games and a number of completely decisive rounds. [Yes, we know "unfought" isn't really a word, but it should be. Along with "fightless."] Chess fans were
delighted.
-
We were able to install live audio commentary by GM Yasser Seirawan and
IM Andrew Martin during live coverage on the Playchess
server.
-
Nigel Short provided a new kind of exuberentatious narrative (we made that
one up too) for our web reports that caught the fancy of the regular visitors
and also of many new chess enthusiasts.
Oh, yes, and maybe we can also credit the dedication of the ChessBase editorial team that
made the trip to San Luis, which is located 12,000 odd kilometres from our base
in Hamburg, Germany, on a different continent in a different hemisphere –
but happily on the same planet. But that is the subject of our next story, to
follow later today...
Frederic Friedel in San Luis
