Olympic Websites Traffic Soars After Opening Ceremony
Posted on September 20, 2000
Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet audience measurement service from Nielsen Media Research, ACNielsen eRatings.com and NetRatings, Inc. reports that Olympic fever has hit the Internet, as daily traffic spiked in Nielsen//NetRatings' Olympic Index. Leading the way in the TV and broadcast category was NBCOlympics.com, which jumped 159 percent to 433,000 unique visitors at home from the day of the opening ceremony to Saturday.
Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services at NetRatings, says in a statement, "By far the top site in the U.S. for pure Olympics coverage is NBC's Olympics site. This shows the relationship between TV and the Web, especially for this tape-delayed event. People are using the Web to find out the latest scores and then decide which events they will want to watch later on TV. NBC also benefits from the huge cross-promotion of its website on both its TV broadcasts as well as that from MSNBC and CNBC."
Saturday was the biggest day for Olympics Web activity over the weekend, as seen in Table 1. Traffic to several categories spiked, with the official Olympic Web sites collectively rising 137 percent over the weekend for the U.S. home audience. Leading the way was the official website, Olympics.com, which jumped 152 percent to nearly 222,000 unique visitors from Friday to Saturday, according to Nielsen//NetRatings' Overnight Analysis.
Table 1. Nielsen//NetRatings Olympics Index, Change in Daily Unique Audience
| Categories | 15-Sep | 16-Sep | % Change from Fri.-Sat. |
| TV/Broadcast | 166,956 | 432,908 | 159.3% |
| Official Olympic Sites | 94,646 | 224,040 | 136.7% |
| Portal | 275,022 | 445,602 | 62.0% |
| Sports | 273,711 | 415,695 | 51.9% |
| News and Information | 175,255 | 192,498 | 9.8% |
| TOTAL | 902,829 | 1,494,503 | 65.5% |
Note: This index is comprised of representative Olympic sites for each category, and acts as a barometer for gauging the level of interest for Olympic information. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings Overnight Analysis, September 2000
Globally, the official websites vaulted to the top for the most page views with NBCOlympics.com and Olympics.com leading the charge. On Sunday NBCOlympics.com registered 5.9 million page views worldwide, while Olympics.com came in second, with 4.3 million page views across the globe (see Table 2).
Table 2. Nielsen//NetRatings Olympics-related domains ranked by page views for September 17
| Rank | Web domain | Page Views |
| 1 | nbcolympics.com | 5.88 million |
| 2 | olympics.com | 4.34 million |
| 3 | sports.yahoo.com | 3.17 million |
| 4 | sportsillustrated.cnn.com | 2.13 million |
| 5 | sports.yahoo.co.jp | 1.71 million |
The portal category increased 62 percent from Friday to Saturday, as U.S. home Internet users interested in seeing the results in real-time clicked their way through up-to-date event results.
``In the battle of old media versus new media, the portals are winning the war. This makes sense as fans look for a quick and reliable place to find up-to-date event results. Given the time zone difference, speed is one of the portals' value propositions,'' said Weiner.
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