Online Olympics Coverage Lures Fans Worldwide

Fans worldwide are heading online to take advantage of around-the-clock access to updated Olympics content and video, Nielsen Online reported Tuesday.

During the first week of competition, an average of 930,000 fans per day, from ten countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, visited Beijing2008.cn, the official Website of the Beijing Games, according to Nielsen.  On several days during that period, traffic to the site exceeded one million unique visitors.

Within China, traffic to Beijing2008.cn, averaged 1.5 million unique browsers per day during the period, according to ChinaRank, Nielsen’s China-based Internet traffic measurement partner.

In the U.S., daily traffic to the video section of NBC’s Olympics site averaged more than 1.5 million unique visitors from home and work, according to Nielsen.  During the same period in Brazil, traffic to the Olympics video section of Terra averaged 119,000 unique visitors from home.  NBC and Terra are both Olympics broadcast partners.

Meanwhile, in China, more than one-quarter of China’s estimated 250 million Internet users viewed Olympics-related online content on a daily basis, according to ChinaRank.  

In all, during the first week of the Games, Chinese Internet users viewed more than 4.6 billion Olympics-related Web pages. 

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter.