Top U.S. Olympics Websites August 6 – 9, 2008

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.

View the full media alert.

Read The Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Nielsen’s results.