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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
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Beijing Bests Turin Online Lured by Portals
August 13, 2008
Just after the opening ceremonies, on 10th August 2008, traffic to Sports websites reached their second highest peak of the year. The most popular Olympics destination online last week was Yahoo! Olympics followed by NBCOlympics.com. It seems that most consumers were lured to Olympics content from portals rather than searching for it directly. Last week, Yahoo! Olympics received 68% of its traffic from Yahoo! and 8% from Yahoo! Sports. Similarly, NBCOlympics.com received 26% of its traffic from MSN.com as a result of prominent placement on the MSN.com homepage.
The 2008 Olympics are set to be very popular online. Last week visits to NBCOlympics.com were 171% higher than the opening weekend for the Turin Winter Games in 2006 (week ending February 11, 2006). (Yahoo! Olympics did not rank the week of the Turin opening in 2006).
The following chart shows daily share of US Internet visits to some of the most popular Olympics destinations online.
Search data reveals that when consumers are searching for the Olympics they are looking for the schedule and in particular the TV schedule, highlighting how online actions affect offline behavior.The following table shows the top ten search terms that included the word "olympics" in the past four weeks.
Next week, we'll look at the most searched for athletes (my money is on Phelps) and other goodies.
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Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:25 AM
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What would be interesting is the halo effect of the Olympics on other verticals. Is there a lot more traffic to Chinese travel related websites for example?
Posted by Nala | August 13, 2008 02:13 PM