• by Kristin Sidorak , February 24, 2006

NBC's Olympics site soared to become the 116th most popular destination on the Web last week, just 10 spots behind the NYTimes.com, according to research firm Hitwise.

One reason for the popularity appears to be that NBCOlympics.com posts results in real-time, so visitors to the site can learn the results hours before the competitions are shown on TV. For instance, visitors to the site at around 5 p.m. East Coast time learned that U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen lost her bid for a gold medal after falling on her first triple lutz.

While that information also was available on online news sites, the NBCOlympics.com site also offered slide shows and near-instantaneous blog entries from the Palavela arena filed by 2002 pairs team of Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. With the wealth of content on NBC's site, the average visit for the week ending Feb. 18 was 9 minutes and 29 seconds--more than two minutes longer than the 7 minute, 20 second average for the Hitwise sports category. What's more, NBCOlympics.com drew a far greater market share of visits than CNN's Sports Illustrated site, which ranked 223rd, and Torino 2006, which placed 588th.

NBC heavily promoted the Olympics site through a video partnership with Google. The search engine provides a small photo and link to NBCOlympics at the top of search results for Olympic-related keywords, while NBC provided Google Video with pre-game and in-game 15-second previews.