Fans from the 10 countries* measured by Nielsen Online visited Beijing2008.cn, the official website of the Beijing Games, at a rate of nearly 930,000 per day, during the first week (Aug. 9-15) of the competition, Nielsen reported (pdf).
Traffic to the site exceeding one million unique visitors on several days during the period as fans sought out Olympics results, news and video, it said.
“Interestingly, traffic from outside of China to the official site tracked closely with medal results at the end of week-one, with visitors from the US, Australia and France in the top three,” said Jon Gibs, vice-president, media analytics, Nielsen Online.
Online Video
In an analysis of visitors to the video sections of two Olympics broadcast partner websites, Nielsen Online reported that NBC in the US and Terra in Brazil are attracting impressive traffic to video content:
- US daily traffic to NBC’s video section averaged more than 1.5 million unique visitors from home and work per day during the period, spiking on Monday, Aug. 11, when over two million unique visitors sought out video content as the work week commenced.
- Traffic within Brazil to the Olympics video section of Terra averaged 119,000 unique visitors per day from home, with traffic above average during the opening weekend.
Usage in China
Not surprisingly, internet traffic in host-country China (with more than 250 million online users, the world’s largest internet population, according to China Internet Network Information Center – CNNIC) reflected strong interest in the games.
More than one-quarter of China’s online users visited Olympics-related content on a daily basis, with an average of 65.8 million unique browsers tracked daily, and viewed more than 4.6 billion Olympics-related pages over the course of the week, according to ChinaRank, a large-scale website-ranking platform hosted by the Internet Society of China.
Within China, traffic to the official site, Beijing2008.cn, averaged 1.5 million unique browsers per day during the first week of the games.
Though online users in China searched a broad range of popular Chinese athletes throughout the week, American swimmer Michael Phelps appeared prominently in the top 10 most-searched Olympics terms during the week, as fans in China followed Phelps’ now successful quest for eight Olympic gold medals.
* Nielsen Online ten-country Olympics reporting includes the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan and Australia.
