Alex Balfour
About Alex Balfour
Alex joined the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) as Head of New Media in 2006.
At LOCOG he has managed the delivery of 77 digital channels including london2012.com, volunteering, education, online shop, mobile apps and social media presences. During the 16 days of the Olympic Games London 2012 channels recorded 431m visits, 109m unique users, 15m app downloads, 4.73bn page views, 4.7m social followers.
Previously, as co-founder of Emerging Media, Alex conceived and delivered the world's first international 2020 cricket tournament televised to 200m viewers in 20 countries. Before that as co-founder and latterly Chairman Alex turned CricInfo.com from a raw start up into a profitable business with 20 million customers and 140 staff in eight countries. He raised £25 million in four funding rounds and generated £2m of profitable turnover making CricInfo the only independent sports dotcom to survive the boom and bust of the late 90s. CricInfo was sold to ESPN in the summer of 2007.
Alex was also a senior member of a team that built the Guardian newspaper's websites, currently the most popular newspaper websites in the UK.
Alex has worked for 17 years in new media and was also responsible for award winning websites including the UK's first general election website and the first online government white paper consultation.
About Digital at scale: How London 2012 delivered the first truly digital Olympic and Paralympic Games
Alex has spent the last six years with LOCOG, as head of new media, planning the digital strategy for London 2012. The scale involved was something else... the stats are mind-boggling. During the Olympic Games the top 200 pages on London2012.com generated more than 1m page views. Peak traffic for the website was 104,792 pages per second! 100m Facebook likes for the games, the athletes and the sponsors. 150m tweets. 83m emails sent, 15m opened, 5m CTR. More than 660m social check-ins. 9,000 server farms were used. We're looking forward to hearing the background story to how Alex's team managed it.


