Yahoolympics scores 17.5 million fans

Yahoo! attracts largest online Olympic audience, Feb. 8 to 14

Whether it’s figure skating, freestyle skiing , snowboarding, hockey, or this year’s big game, curling, Winter Olympics fans are turning online in record numbers. And Yahoo!—the single most visited site for the Winter Olympics—is winning the gold in terms of unique visitors.

Yahoo’s Olympics site attracted 9.3 million unique visitors from February 8 to 14, according to comScore. That’s the largest online Olympics audience for the period, which included the Opening Ceremony and the first three days of competition, while Yahoo! Sports attracted more than 17.5 million unique visitors. Yahoo’s Olympics site surpassed both NBC’s Olympics site (6.5 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors) during the same period.

“The Olympics are one of those events that people aren’t willing to wait until prime yime to find out what happened,” says Kyle Laughlin, Head of Yahoo! Sports and Games. “The team did a fantastic job putting a plan in place to deliver the right content at the right time for our users.”

Fresh content and user engagement key to winning audiences
With one of the largest editorial teams in Vancouver, led by award-winning writer Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! provides solid news, analysis and color commentary, making us an even more attractive venue for Olympics fans to get the information and entertainment they crave, while also connecting with engaged friends and fellow fans.

We’re also there on the ground in Vancouver. We’ve built an entertainment center, FanCouver, where fans attending the games can participate in Yahoo! events and advertiser promotions. And then, of course, there’s our Olympics mobile site, which provides the latest scores and information for those on-the-go. Together, these are building Olympic engagement online, on the ground and through the air.

“The Olympics is such a special event that speaks to peoples true national pride and passion for sports that we felt it was deserving of an entire ‘experience’ for our users,” says Laughlin. “We were able to leverage our leading platforms on mobile and online with a tremendous presence in Vancouver to deliver on that promise.”

For more coverage, see MediaWeek.

— Michael Mattis

(Curling image by bensonkua via Flickr, CC 2.0)

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