ComScore Has Yahoo Ahead Of NBC's Olympic Site For Unique Users

By Eric Fisher, Staff Writer, SportsBusiness Journal

Yahoo Claims Its Olympics Web Site Last Week Outdrew NBCOlympics.com

The battle for Olympic online traffic bragging rights remains in full force as Yahoo Sports released traffic data from comScore Media Metrix indicating its Olympics-specific site drew 19.4 million unique users in the U.S. for the week ended August 17, 37% higher than the 14.2 million garnered by NBCOlympics.com. Overall, Yahoo Sports drew 23.9 million unique users for the week according to the comScore data, its best single week over the past year. The data clashes somewhat with Nielsen Online-generated numbers showing NBCOlympics.com with far higher engagement statistics, with the average time spent on NBCOlympics.com registering at 15:50 minutes per average daily visit compared to 6:49 minutes on Yahoo's Olympics section, and NBCOlympics.com receiving two-thirds of page views for all Olympic sites, compared to 26.9% for Yahoo. As for unique users, the Nielsen data shows a much closer race than the comScore figures, with Nielsen reporting a daily average of 4.73 million unique users on Yahoo Olympics for the August 8-18 period, compared to 4.27 million on NBCOlympics.com. AOL Olympics ranked third in that chart with 1.32 million, and SI Olympics posted in fourth place with a daily average of 704,000 unique users for the period, ahead of larger competitors such as ESPN and the Beijing2008.cn site.