Sales of Washington Wizards jerseys with the number '98' spiked after his coming out, ABC News reports:
Team spokesman Scott Hall told ABC News that 100 percent of custom jerseys ordered from the team’s online store bore Collins’ name and number, 98, on the back, after Collins revealed his homosexuality in an article published on Sports Illustrated’s website on Monday…While Hall could not reveal how many custom Collins jerseys were sold, he said that the team’s general merchandise sales and online traffic spiked following Collins’ announcement.
The '98' was, as you may know, a tribute to Matthew Shepard.
Collins' story led to record website traffic for Sports illustrated, Mashable reports:
The magazine's website, SI.com, drew 3.713 million unique visitors Monday. Its previous high came on Feb. 9, 2010, when the site drew 3.663 million unique visitors for both its Winter-Olympics coverage and launch of its annual swimsuit issue.
The site also reported a record-setting mobile day, with 740,000 unique visitors generating 1.5 million pageviews via smartphones and other devices. The company says that's three times the site's normal mobile pageview number, and five times its average number of unique visitors since relaunching for mobile last October.
On the flipside, Collins has been receiving some online death threats.
