Online Olympic Traffic Favoring Yahoo Over NBC

Numbers reflecting traffic to NBC’s Olympics-related sites have been released, and despite protests about Tibet and time delays, they’re looking rather impressive.  The one problem, as far as NBC’s concerned: Yahoo’s numbers appear to be even better.

While NBC bought the exclusive rights to broadcast the 2008 Summer Olympics, Yahoo’s strategy of supporting a special site with search shortcuts is gaining fans.  On August 8th, Yahoo’s Olympic content attracted a unique audience of 1.5 million people, according to Nielsen Online.  Almost 5.3 million came to look around on August 11th.

 NBC Loses Early Lead

NBC started out stronger at the beginning of that period, with a unique audience of 2.7 million folks, but only reached 4.6 million individuals at the end.  The gap between it and Yahoo looks ready to grow even more unless something odd happens.

Count on Yahoo showing these figures to advertisers as a way of demonstrating its ability to stay relevant, then.  This is also the sort of thing that might come up if (gosh forbid) we ever get stuck in more months-long acquisition negotiations.

Other top sites include AOL Olympics, Beijing2008.cn, and New York Times Olympics, although they all trail Yahoo and NBC by quite a bit.