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Welcome to esctoday.com
Esctoday.com (Eurovision Song Contest Today) is the most visited, independent website about the Eurovision Song Contest. This year, we celebrate our fifth birthday. In this section, we would like to present esctoday.com ánd ourselves to you. Thank you for visiting esctoday.com and we're looking forward to welcome you in the near future again!
The story behind esctoday.com
Welcome to esctoday.com
It's May 12th, 2000. A 16-year old student from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, received an invitation from a friend: "It was the day of the Eurovision Song Contest 2000 in Stockholm, a friend invited me to watch the contest at her home. Because I had an internet connection at home, she asked me to print the list of participants to bring that night. Surprisingly I couldn't find it, except at the official site, which was quite slow at my computer"... That's how Chief Editor and founder of esctoday.com, Sietse Bakker, describes his first Eurovision-on-the-web experience.
"A few months later, during the summer holiday, I was searching for a way to spend my bored times. Some friends of me were making a website, and I asked the same friend as the one I watched the Eurovision Song Contest 2000 with, about which subject my website had to be about. She came up with the idea to make a site about the contest".
The start-up
The first weeks, the website appeared under the name eurosong2001.net. Not the best name, especially because the domain name would be useless after the 2001 contest. To point out the daily updates on the latest news about the Eurovision Song Contest, the name esctoday.com was chosen, which stands for Eurovision Song Contest Today. The launch took place on October 11th, 2000. Visitors on the first day: 30. Number of editors: 1.
The first Eurovision season
During the first Eurovision season, esctoday.com attracted more and more visitors. After a few months two editors joined the team and a Spanish version of the site appeared online (which is the independent eurovision-spain.com nowadays). In co-operation with Euro-Music we reported daily from Copenhagen, where the contest took place in 2001. With a maximum of 6,000 visitors on one day, esctoday.com broke a new visitor record.
Time for modernisation
During the summer of 2001, when esctoday.com celebrated its first anniversary, one of the youngest internet business men in Europe Danny Mekic' (14 at that time) suggested esctoday.com to modernize. Together with team member Wouter van Vliet he wrote scripts in the programming language PHP to make the site more dynamic.
Eurovision in Estonia
With Estonia being the host of the Eurovision Song Contest 2002, esctoday.com attracted two Estonian editors to publish news in the language of the host country. A highly appreciated action, the amount of visitors raised to 80,000 visitors on the day of the contest. Our editor Remi Kübar and Newsteam.net photographer Andre Bandera served esctoday.com from the press centre in Tallinn.
The big boom!
More and more editors joined the team and it was time for a more professional appearance in the 2002-2003 season, when Eurovision was about to move to Riga, Latvia. In November 2002, a select team of esctoday.com team members visited the EBU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. It was certainly time for some changes. To introduce the changes to our visitors in a visual way, esctoday.com was totally revamped again. Every change in the layout, the website became more function to its users. In a short time, the esctoday.com grow to 35 editors from 15 countries throughout Europe. During the Eurovision Song Contest week in Riga, the website welcomed between 150,000 and 250,000 visitors every day and media from all participating countries were interested in esctoday.com. In The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Latvia and more counties esctoday.com appeared in national media.
In the summer of 2003 the esctoday.com staff team decided to change the website's layout again to create more Eurovision athmosphere. Some changes in the team and the guidelines for editors are changes to make esctoday.com a professional, international media organization. Technology is now under the wings of Interlize Media Solutions, while the editorial management and content are being managed within the esctoday.com company, registered in the Netherlands (Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce 34194836).
In 2003, esctoday.com generated more than 10,000,000 pageviews and in 2004 the website already generated more than 25,000,000 pageviews!
