Alexa Research Reveals Early Winners of Olympic Web Coverage

  • by September 26, 2000
Web traffic measurer Alexa Research today released online traffic results from the first half of the Olympics, revealing that Olympics.com, the official web site of the Sydney2000 Olympic Games, is the "gold medalist" thus far.

Olympics.com is leading the field with more than 100 million pageviews since the Games began, more than twice as many as the next closest site, NBCOlympics.com. The findings are based on estimates derived from web pages visited by members of the Alexa Internet panel, between September 15 and 23, 2000.

"Olympics.com appears headed for a spot among the top 50 websites for the month of September," predicts Matthew Work, vice president of Alexa Research. "Olympics.com was ranked 767th in August, with 15.3 million pageviews. That's nearly a sevenfold increase in traffic, and there's still another week of Olympic competition left."

With more than 50 million pageviews during the first half of coverage, NBCOlympics.com is the second most popular destination for online Olympic coverage behind Olympics.com. NBCOlympics.com was ranked 3,831st in August with just over three million pageviews and is likely to crack the top 100 in September," noted Work. "NBC has benefited from its network of websites to generate a large volume of traffic to its Olympic website." More than 1 in 4 visitors to the site came from either an MSNBC.com page (17.4%), an NBC.com page (9.1%) or an NBCi.com page (2.0%). In addition, an estimated 2.6% of NBCOlympics.com's visitors came from an Olympics.com page.

General sports-related web sites are drawing substantial traffic from Olympic information-seekers. Yahoo.com was the third most popular destination overall for online Olympic coverage, with more than 11.5 million Olympic-related pageviews, topping CNNSI.com (7.4 million Olympic-related pageviews), MSNBC.com (6.5 million) and ESPN.go.com (5.4 million).

A number of non-sports-related web sites have also felt the boon of Olympic web coverage, particularly those promoting the home of this year's Olympiad. Australia.com, Australia's tourism site, has drawn more than six million pageviews during the first half of the Games, an increase of 287% from its August traffic, when it was ranked 7,137th. Sydneylink.com, which offers a rich media exploration of the host city, has seen its pageview visits more than quadruple since August, to nearly 1.3 million during the first week of competition alone.

There has also been at least one unintended beneficiary, proving the importance of domain names in generating traffic. Olympic.com, the site of Olympic paint, which registered an estimated 144,000 pageviews for the entire month of August (ranked 56,085th), has logged an estimated 615,000 pageviews since the Olympics began, an increase of 327%. One in 55 visitors to the Olympics.com site came from the paint site, which offers a link to the Olympics site.

The most popular sports online for the first week of competition (Sept. 15 - 21), based

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