Australia beats Great Britain in Olympics ... in online ratings

by Staff, Brand Republic 20-Aug-08, 11:30

LONDON - Australia has finally topped Great Britain in an Olympic poll, by delivering more unique users a day to the official website of the Beijing games.

Australia usually prides itself on performing better at the Olympics than Great Britain but this year has had to face up to a drubbing in terms of the gold medal count.

That hasn't stopped the country's sports fans from taking a keen interest, with research published by Nielsen Online today showing that during the first week of the games the average daily unique audience to Beijing2008.cn from Australia was 71,300, compared with 54,000 visitors from Britain.

However, both countries trailed behind the US, which accounted for 554,800 visitors a day to the site, and France, with 123,000, although the figures cover the period before the British gold rush began in earnest.

Within China, traffic to the site averaged at about 1.5m unique users a day during the first week, with record-breaking swimmer Michael Phelps proving a huge draw for the host nation's web users, according to research complied by Nielsen in conjunction with ChinaRank.

Jon Gibs, vice-president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said: "Michael Phelps is clearly the global story of these games. Online news, information and video have allowed fans from all over the world to follow his record-breaking performances and watch history in the making."

Comments

Ed Kemp - 20/08/2008

I'm very pleased that we are doing so well in the medal table, but let's not turn this into a GB vs Australia thing. It makes us look a little pathetic if we gloat when we beat them. We are a decent sporting nation with plenty of resources so we should be them on a fairly regular basis. I knew our gloating after the Ashes would come back to haunt us and sure enough 18 months later we got royally hammered... I think it would reflect better on us if we were more humble in victory as well as in defeat.

Oliver Morgan - 20/08/2008

...and all because we have the wonderful BBC, no need to visit the official site

Michael Laws - 20/08/2008

Ed, we can't allow the Aussies a monopoly on gloating (they are pretty good at that too). Let's enjoy the small victories in the relentless green and gold tide.