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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
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Aussies & Kiwi’s most interested in Olympics Online
August 07, 2008
Australian and New Zealand audiences are leading the charge to the official Olympics website in the lead-in to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
With the Games already underway and the Opening ceremony on Friday night audiences will continue to flock to the various Olympic sites - official, broadcaster and media partner sites.
A look at the comparative market shares of the official Olympic website (Chinese and English language versions) by country shows US and UK online audiences interest trailing the Asia Pacific nations, during the week ending 2 August, 2008. Singapore had taken the early lead in the week ending 19 July, but have been taken over by New Zealand and Australia.
A lot has changed since I was involved with Olympics.com during the Sydney 2000 Games, regarded at the time as the very first digital Games. Then, the official site was the leader in all major markets. Now, News and Media websites are more sophisticated with multimedia capabilities that make it very difficult for a once-every-four-years site to compete against.
The official Beijing Olympic Games website will have some stiff competition in each market to retain users and provide sponsors with value.
In the US the official site has very strong competition from the North American broadcasters' site, www.nbcolympics.com, which will feature some 3,000+ hours of video. Traffic could also be siphoned away by major newspapers sites, ESPN and the likes of Yahoo!.
UK, Australia and New Zealand online audiences appear to be committed to the official site, but with official broadcasters and print media partners ramping up the marketing and promotional efforts of their special Olympic microsites, the competition will be as hot as the 100m Men's final.
In Hong Kong, the main focus is on local events. Included in the Hong Kong numbers above is the official site of the Equestrian event which is out performing the larger Beijing 2008 site. A heightened interest in Equestrian (being staged in Hong Kong), combined with the dominant Yahoo! Coverage places the Olympic site sits in third place, but with no guarantee that it will maintain the audience with large well resourced sites such as Sina, QQ and Netease all pushing hard for their share of audience.
Over the coming weeks we'll be reporting key findings relating to each country's unique online interactions with the Olympics, and sponsor-outcomes through the Hitwise data set.
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Posted by Alan Long at 01:00 PM
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In Categories Beijing 2008 | Brand | Entertainment | NBC | Olympics | Sport | Television
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Was quite surprised to see the US having the least amount of visitors but you're right - some of the other major websites probably take in most of our traffic. Great article!
Posted by Nick Stamoulis | August 7, 2008 01:58 PM