Fans flock to official Olympics site

by Maisie McCabe, Media Week 20-Aug-08, 15:45

LONDON - Nearly one million Olympics fans are using the internet each day to access the official Olympics content online, according to data released by Nielsen Online.

Data from 10 countries, including the UK, Australia, the US and France, showed that fans visited the official website of the Olympics, Bejing2008.cn, at a rate of 930,000 a day in the first week of the games, with some days exceeding one million unique users.

Analysis of the video sections of Olympics broadcast partner website NBC in the US showed that an average 1.5 million users are watching Olympics footage on NBC.

During the first week of the Games, ChinaRank data for 200 Olympics-related sites showed an average of 65.8 million unique Chinese users a day, viewing a total of 4.5 billion Olympics-related pages.

Within China, the official site averaged 1.5 million unique users a day and eight gold medal-winner Michael Phelps was in the top 10 of searched for terms.