• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 20, 2008

The Olympic Web sites of NBC and Yahoo have gotten their share of attention for garnering strong ratings so far during the Games. But what about Beijing2008.cn, the official site of the Summer Olympics?

Traffic from 10 major countries outside China averaged 930,000 daily visitors to the site from Aug. 9 to 15, with the U.S. accounting for more than half the audience at 554,800.

The audience within China isn't that much bigger--a daily average 1.5 million, according to ChinaRank, a large-scale Web site ranking platform hosted by the Internet Society of China. But a total of 65.8 million are visiting Olympics-related content online.

Nielsen also released ratings for the video sections of NBCOlympics.com and Brazilian partner site Terra.com. NBC's Olympics video site averaged 1.5 million visitors during the first week, while Terra's video offering had 119,000 daily users. The Nielsen data did not include information on the number of streams viewed.

Yahoo cited comScore data last week showing that its Olympic site had drawn more than 8 million visitors compared to 6.7 for NBCOlympics.com and 1.7 for Beijing2008.cn for the week ending Aug. 10.

NBC has developed the Total Audience Measurement Index (TAMI) to determine the reach of its coverage across TV, online, mobile and VOD. The tool shows that online and mobile ratings have generally been climbing steadily during the Games.

For the week ending Aug. 16, traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked at nearly 8 million last Friday when U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his sixth gold medal, according to the TAMI data. NBC's mobile coverage reached a high of 667,876 on Saturday, when Phelps won his seventh and record eighth gold medals.

NBC total audience for the Olympics that day also hit a high of 107.8 million. With Phelps now out of the pool, NBC can only hope ratings for the rest of the Games don't take a dive.