• by Masha Geller , February 22, 2002

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that the two official Olympic sites, NBCOlympics.com and Olympics.com, jumped in traffic at-work during the week ending February 17, leading to the ladies' figure skating finals last night.

"As with other recent events on the global stage, the Olympics' drama has been played out across all media, especially the Web. We expect that fans will continue to turn to the Web for breaking news following the ladies' figure skating long program," said Jarvis Mak, senior Internet analyst at NetRatings yesterday.

Considering Russia just filed another Winter Olympics protest, demanding a gold medal for second-placed skater Irina Slutskaya, Mak is probably right.

In the last 7 days, both websites attracted their largest audience since the Winter Olympics began, drawing more office workers than at-home surfers. NBCOlympics.com skyrocketed 119% to 1.9 million visitors while Olympics.com jumped 44% to more than one million surfers.

Surfers accessed 21.6 million pages at NBCOlympics.com, skyrocketing 258% week-over-week. More than 18.6 million pages were viewed at Olympics.com, jumping 72%. Surfers spent an average of 8 minutes at NBCOlympics.com and 9 minutes at Olympics.com, rising 62% and 11%, respectively.

Elsewhere on the web, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft and Google continued to be the most popular properties with both at-home and at-work; the average at-home surfer went online 7 times, spending just over 3 hours and 40 minutes surfing. At work, the average surfer went online 13 times, spending more than 7 hours surfing. The duration of a page viewed is averaging at about 55 seconds for both at-home and at-work surfers.

The current U.S. Internet Universe, according to NetRatings, is 167.5 million at-home users and 44.4 million at-work users.