NBCU, Yahoo Sites Ring In Olympics With Traffic Records

American sports fans are turning to the Web to follow the 2008 Summer Olympics in droves, setting as many records as have the Olympic swimmers over the first four days of the Beijing games, according to figures compiled by Nielsen Online and NBC Universal. From Aug. 6, two days before the opening ceremonies, thorugh Aug. 9, the first full day of competition, traffic has steadily built on various sports and official Olympic sites, with NBC and Yahoo emerging as clear early leaders. According to Nielsen, NBCOlympics.com, which besides offering up to the minute results and highlights will stream over 2,200 hours of live competition through the course of the games' 17 days, drew over 4 million unique users this past Saturday. That's up from the 2.7 million users who logged in the previous day, and less than 1 million that did so on Aug. 6. Yahoo's Olympics site, which does not offer any live footage, pulled in a solid 3.3 million unique users on Aug. 9, bringing it within 684,000 users of NBC's traffic and 2 million more than the third place finisher AOL Olympics, which saw over 1 million users log in that day. Meanwhile, NBC officials are reporting that at least early on its Olympic site is blowing away the results of the most recent summer games four years ago in Athens, Greece. The site recorded 70 million page views on Aug. 8 (opening ceremonies), a whopping 10-fold increase versus the just 7 million page views generated in 2004. In fact, those 70 million page views bested the Athens Olympic's strongest traffic day by almost 50 million, said NBC.As for its much-hyped live video offering, NBCOlympics appears to be off to a solid start, though comparisons are difficult, since until this year, the network has offered next to no live Olympic coverage on the Web. Over 430,000 users sought out video footage of the opening ceremonies on Aug. 8 (that figure represents all traffic to NBC's video URL, whether fans are accessing live or on demand footage). By the next day, according to Nielsen, that audience soared past 850,000 as competition in marquee events such as swimming and gymnastics commenced.Other prominent sports news sites have enjoyed traffic spikes as a result of early interest in the games, but not in the neighborhood of NBC, Yahoo and AOL's Olympic sites. Perhaps surprisingly, ESPN.com reached just 343,000 uniques on Aug. 9, up just 100,000 from the previous day. Sports Illustrated's Olympics site yielded just 112,000 users on Aug. 9, up from just 45,000 on the day of the opening ceremonies. Both sports category leaders were beaten by the New York Times' Olympics site, which pulled in 466,000 users during the first day of competition.

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NBCU, Yahoo Sites Ring In Olympics With Traffic Records

Mike Shields

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