Super Bowl Commercials Echo on the Web

The Super Bowl ads for Snickers were criticized for being homophobic and were quickly pulled. But they worked in one respect: Snickers.com’s share of all Web visits was almost 16 times larger than it had been a week earlier, according to the traffic-measurement firm Hitwise. Budlight.com saw its share grow by 655.87 percent. (Hitwise reports Web site traffic as a proportion of all Internet activity, rather than an absolute number of visits.)
But those sites were so small that it was easy for them to grow by huge percentages while still remaining tiny; neither had more than 0.001 percent of all traffic on Monday. The largest numbers of new visitors, meanwhile, went to Internet companies like Careerbuilder.com, which went from hosting 0.153 percent to 0.158 percent of all Web visits.
The jury is still out on whether large TV buys are worthwhile for online companies. “You’ve got a dot-com spending $2 million on a 30-second exposure to upwards of 90 million people, not all of whom are going to even have Internet access,” said LeeAnn Prescott, a research director at Hitwise. “Online advertising can be much more targeted.” ALEX MINDLIN, NYTimes.com