• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 15, 2005

Riding the successful wave of its Live 8 coverage, America Online on Thursday said it was extending on-demand availablilty of the event by three weeks until Sept. 5. Also, having already made headlines for trouncing Live 8's TV coverage, AOL reported that its music site has now drawn over 8.5 million unique visitors, and recorded over 25 million on-demand content plays, since Live 8 streamed live on July 2.

Five million unique users visited AOL Music on the day of the event, compared to a combined average of 2.2 million viewers who watched the event from noon to 8 p.m. on MTV and VH1--according to Nielsen Media Research--and an average of 2.9 million viewers who caught ABC's coverage during primetime.

But some analysts aren't sure that AOL can sustain such strong traffic, or parlay it into ad dollars. "They delivered the goods, they did a good job, but it will really be something if they can hold on to some of that audience," said David Card, Jupiter Research analyst, referring to AOL's Live 8 coverage.

For perspective, Card mentioned as-yet-unpublished Jupiter numbers, which position AOL's properties leading most other Web properties in terms of viewership, but fourth in terms of ad revenue. "That tells me that AOL isn't getting their fare share," Card concluded.

AOL and Yahoo! currently are neck-and-neck in the race to dominate the online music space. AOL Music drew a unique audience of approximately 12.19 million visitors for the week ending May 29, while Yahoo! Music garnered approximately 11.33 million, according to the eMarketer report, "Online Music: Downloads, Streaming, Radio, Mobile," which cited data provided by Nielsen//NetRatings.