Complex sentence: The time in which information about the challenge spread rapidly was actually more compressed than a month, however: in the week preceding the launch day, the official competition site increased in traffic from an average of 1,000 hits per day to 20,000 hits per day.
Split into simpler sentences: The time in which information about the challenge spread was actually more compressed than a month. However, in the week preceding the launch day the official competition site increased in traffic from an average of 1,000 hits per day to 20,000 hits per day.