• September 19, 2000

Olympic fever has hit the Internet, as daily traffic spiked in Nielsen//NetRatings' Olympics Index. Leading the way in the TV and broadcast category was NBCOlympics.com, which jumped 159% to 433,000 unique visitors at home from the day of the opening ceremony to Saturday.

"By far the top site in the U.S. for pure Olympics coverage is NBC's Olympics site," said Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services at NetRatings. "This shows the relationship between TV and the Web, especially for this tape-delayed event. People are using the Web to find out the latest scores and then decide which events they will want to watch later on TV."

"NBC also benefits from the huge cross-promotion of its website on both its TV broadcasts as well as that from MSNBC and CNBC," Weiner said.

Saturday was the biggest day for Olympics Web activity over the weekend. Traffic to several categories spiked, with the official Olympic sites collectively rising 137% over the weekend for the U.S. home audience. Leading the way was the official website, Olympics.com, which jumped 152% to nearly 222,000 unique visitors from Friday to Saturday.