During the first two days of the 2008 Olympics (August 8-9), NBCOlympics.com was the most visited, Olympics-related U.S. website, Nielsen Online reported Monday.
Yahoo's Olympics site drew slightly larger unique audiences in the two days leading up to the Opening Ceremony in Beijing (August 6-7), but its popularity was eclipsed by NBC's site after the Olympics Opening Ceremony aired on NBC on Friday, August 8.
| Rank (by Aug. 9 UA) | Website | Unique Audience: Aug. 6 (in 000’s) | Unique Audience: Aug. 7 (in 000’s) | Unique Audience: Aug. 8 (in 000’s) | Unique Audience: Aug. 9 (in 000’s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NBC Olympics | 841 | 1,392 | 2,664 | 4,008 |
| 2 | Yahoo Olympics | 1,505 | 1,430 | 1,477 | 3,324 |
| 3 | AOL Olympics | 511 | 718 | 395 | 1,010 |
| 4 | Beijing2008.cn | 39 | 114 | 429 | 780 |
| 5 | New York Times Olympics | 432 | 369 | 341 | 466 |
| 6 | ESPN Olympics | 196 | 80 | 273 | 343 |
| 7 | Sports Illustrated Olympics | 458 | 239 | 293 | 331 |
| 8 | USA Today Olympics | 34 | 55 | 280 | 184 |
| 9 | Olympics.org | NA* | 10 | 16 | 153 |
| 10 | BBC Olympics | 33 | 27 | 97 | 128 |
| Source: The Nielsen Company, Custom Analysis (August 6 - August 9, 2008) | |||||
| Daily data may fluctuate because of smaller sample sizes used to project daily audience sizes. | |||||
| *Not reportable for daily data | |||||
NBC Olympics' unique audience jumped from 1.39 million visitors on August 7, the day before the Olympics began, to 2.66 million visitors on August 8, the day of the opening ceremony. On the first day of competition (August 9), NBC Olympics' unique audience jumped again to 4.0 million visitors.
In comparison, Yahoo Olympic drew 1.43 million unique visitors on August 7, 1.47 million visitors on August 8, and 3.32 million visitors on August 9.
AOL's Olympics site ranked third among the most visited U.S.-based Olympics websites, after NBC Olympics and Yahoo Olympics.
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Read The Los Angeles Times' coverage of Nielsen’s results.
