• August 12, 2008

NBC's Olympic site drew an audience of more than 4 million on Saturday, leading the pack of new sites dedicated to the Beijing Games, according to Nielsen Online. Yahoo Olympics followed with 3.3 million, and AOL Olympics had 1 million.

The Nielsen ratings showed that traffic to NBCOlympics.com had grown more than four-fold from Wednesday to Saturday last week, while the audience for its video offering doubled to 858,000 from Friday to Saturday. NBC has said it will offer 2,200 hours of live Olympics programming online plus 3,000 hours of on-demand footage.

"With the unique audience to NBC's Olympics video section doubling from August 8th to August 9th, and overall traffic to NBC Olympics growing by 50 percent, it will be interesting to track video usage trends throughout the games," said Jon Gibs, vice president, media analytics at Nielsen Online, in a statement.

A Wall Street Journal story on Monday suggested that NBC's unprecedented online coverage had so far helped to expand its overall audience for the Olympics rather than cannibalize TV viewership.--Mark Walsh