Interest in the Beijing Summer Olympics and the start of the football season drove a 26-per-cent boost in August traffic on U.S. sports websites viewed at work, a unit of Nielsen Co. said Thursday.
The number of unique visitors accessing sports websites from their office locations grew to 42.3 million in August, up from 33.4 million last year, according to Nielsen Online.
“With broad interest in the Olympics, and the ramp up of the college and professional football seasons, August was a busy month for online sports fans,” Jon Gibs, vice-president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said in a statement.
“The Web offered 24/7 access to news, results and video, and fans demonstrated a healthy appetite for information about their favorite athletes and teams,” he added.
NBC Universal’s NBC Olympics website, custom built for the Beijing Games, reached 20 per cent of the active at work online population, or slightly more than 13.8 million unique visitors, Nielsen said. Those visitors stayed for a long look, spending an average of 57 minutes and seven seconds at the website.
Yahoo Sports was the No. 1 online sports destination at work with 18.7 million visitors, more than double last year’s numbers, Nielsen said.
Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN and Fox Sports on MSN took the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, with 11.9 million and 7.7 million visitors, respectively, Nielsen said.
NBC Universal is the media wing of General Electric Co. Fox is part of News Corp.
Among the Top 10 sports sites, No. 9 Fantasy Sports Ventures Network was the fastest growing, up 285 per cent to 3.9 million visitors.
source: canada.com
October 6th, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] Beijing Olympic Games 2008 drive lots of sports internet traffic By Rob Ladin … college and professional football seasons, August was a busy month for online sports fans,? Jon Gibs, vice-president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said in a statement. ?The Web offered 24/7 access to news, results and video, … Olympic Times Daily sports – http://www.robladin.com [...]