Olympics Fever Hits the Web

With the 2008 Olympics finally happening in Beijing, China, it’s prime time for Olympics-related Web sites. Nielsen Online took a recent snapshot of the online Olympics landscape to see which related sites were visited the most during the days leading up to and including the first day of events, August 9th.

NBC Olympics welcomed more than 4.0 million unique U.S. visitors on Saturday, August 9th, the first day of events. Yahoo! Olympics was second with 3.3 million visitors on August 9th, followed by AOL Olympics with 1.0 million visitors.

Beijing2008.cn received 780,000 U.S. visitors on August 9th. New York Times Olympics welcomed 466,000 unique visitors, followed by ESPN Olympics with 343,000 visitors, USA Today Olympics with 184,000 visitors, Olympics.org with 153,000 visitors, BBC Olympics with 128,000 visitors, and Sports Illustrated Olympics with 112,000 visitors.

It should be noted again that these figures reflect the number of unique audience members from the U.S.

All sites saw an upward trend in the size of their unique audience as the first day of events crept closer, though some sites experienced erratic upward movement.

NBC Olympics is offering a comprehensive video section on their Web site, powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. This section drew a unique audience of 436,000 in the U.S. on the day of the opening ceremony (August 8th). This audience ballooned to 858,000 unique visitors on the next day.

On Monday, Robin Goad at Hitwise unveiled the top 10 fastest moving search terms in the U.K. Not surprisingly, Olympics-related terms dominated the list:

Sources:
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_080811.pdf

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/08/fast_moving_search_terms_olympics_celbrities_exams.html