… is supposed to stand for “organizing.” But, as we reported earlier in the week, the sale of the second batch of Olympics tickets “organized” by the Beijing games’ planning committee quickly turned into a debacle, with only a handful of tickets getting sold and the throngs lining up around the block at Bank of China branches around the country being told to try again another day. The reason was that people buying tickets online can request them far more quickly than their counterparts who actually go and queue up. They also happened to have the added advantage, which apparently went unnoticed by BOCOG, of being able to submit multiple requests for tickets by simply clicking a bunch of times. Our pal Imagethief has a good post on the episode here (more after the jump):
The actual story was that sales went live at 9am Tuesday. In a frantic online rush, the server was whacked with 200,000 submissions per minute and 8 million page views in the first hour (with more submissions than page views as people presumable repeatedly clicked to submit). Needless to say the site went down faster than a sailor’s shorts in Subic.
Just 9,000 tickets were sold, despite the 200,000 submissions per minute. And yet, as Imagethief notes, the opening of the state media story on the event incredibly points this out as a good thing:
9,000 tickets sold after launch of second phase sale
Updated：2007-10-30(BEIJING, October 29) — At 9:00 a.m., on Tuesday, the second phase of the ticket sale for the Beijing Olympic Games was launched. As of 11 a.m., a total of 9,000 tickets had been sold through various channels, with the official ticketing website and the outlets of the Bank of China contributing to 98 percent of the sales.
And, by the way, the rest of the 1.85 million tickets couldn’t be sold, so everyone waiting in line (some for up to six hours) had to go home.
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