Many leading UK news publishers saw a bump in website traffic during the Paris Olympics, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows.
US sites meanwhile saw a drop in visits compared to the previous fortnight, likely because the weeks before the event saw the Donald Trump assassination attempt and news Joe Biden was standing down as president.
But in both the US and UK the year-on-year traffic trends were strongly up and publishers reported far more interest in the Paris games than the covid-impacted 2021 Tokyo event.
Among top UK news sites, the publishers that saw the largest bump over the 18-day Olympic period this year were the BBC (visits up 5% on the 18 days immediately before), The Independent (10%) and the Birmingham Mail (12%).
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Mail Sport said it received double the average daily page views at the 2024 Olympics versus Tokyo, which had been scheduled for summer 2020 but was postponed because of the Covid pandemic and took place without spectators.
The Sun, similarly, told Press Gazette it saw 70% higher site traffic on Olympic articles this summer, and The Guardian’s total page views were 44% higher than during the Tokyo Olympics and 52% higher than Rio de Janeiro’s. Daily page views were “up every single day except one compared to previous Games”, a spokesperson for The Guardian said.
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Independent editor Geordie Greig said in a statement that site traffic was “33% higher than forecast” over the Paris Olympics and that the title’s reporting on Imane Khelif, a female boxer subjected to online backlash over her gender, “generated 20% of our overall Games traffic”.
“Gymnast Simone Biles, sprinter Noah Lyles and British tennis hero Andy Murray also captured our readers’ imagination,” he said, “with millions of people reading our industry-leading commentary from our correspondents in Paris.”
Mail Sport said it saw more than 100 million page views on Olympic-specific stories. The publisher added that it saw its third-most daily page views in the last four years on Tuesday 6 August, a day that featured the finals of the men’s 1,500 metre and the women’s 200m runs.
The Guardian said the fourth day of the games, 30 July, saw its greatest traffic, “with Simone Biles and the USA winning gold in the gymnastics team final, while other top stories included the Guardian’s medals table, the opening ceremony live blog and news stories on Imane Khelif, ‘floating surfer’ Gabriel Medina and Vinesh Phogat’s disqualification”.
A spokesperson for The New York Times Company said its sports title The Athletic saw “two of our ten biggest weeks” ever during the Paris Olympics.
The Washington Post, similarly, said the three weeks of the games “were among The Washington Post’s top five weeks of the year in terms of reach, across site, app and off-platform”.
The title’s most-read reporting included live event coverage and “pieces reporting on issues in the spotlight”, including the backlash against Khelif.
A spokesperson for the publication said an animated Instagram post about gymnastics moves originated by and named for Simone Biles “had a reach of 8.5 million and was a great example of our unique coverage that went beyond the medal counts”
Sun head of digital sport says Olympic traffic no longer driven by social media
Alex Peake, The Sun’s head of digital sport, told Press Gazette there was “much more of an even split” in where that traffic was coming this year when compared with in previous Olympics.
“Direct traffic was up, search traffic was up, and it’s just a bit more of a balanced picture as opposed to what it was three years ago when Facebook was nearly 50% of the page views we drove during Tokyo,” he said.
“The Olympics, I suppose, is different to pretty much everything else we cover. When you look at the sports we do day in, day out, like football or boxing, everything follows a pattern.
“The great thing about the Olympics, which makes it quite special to cover, is the fact that a lot of the people we’re writing about, we don’t know anything about, that we’ve probably never heard of them before.”
Press Gazette looked at daily traffic over the period for the top 20 publishers on Press Gazette’s June rankings of the most-visited news sites in the US and the UK. (Daily traffic data was not available for certain sites: in the UK, ITV, Money Saving Expert, The Times, Healthline, Global, GB News and the Daily Record, and in the US USA Today, Forbes, CNBC, Newsweek and The Guardian.)
[Read more: Advertising blocklists unfairly targeted coverage from Olympics and Euros]
In the US, meanwhile, only two top-20 sites — news.yahoo.com and people.com — saw more traffic over the Olympics than the weeks leading into the games.
However, most news sites analysed by Press Gazette did see US traffic growth when compared against the same set of dates last year. Fox News, The New York Times, CBS News, NBC News, CNN and BBC.com all saw growth of between ten and 20%, while People.com saw a 46% rise in traffic and the Associated Press 63%.
The same was true in the UK, where four sites — Sky News, The Telegraph, Metro and the Birmingham Mail — all saw average daily page view growth of at least 30%. The Birmingham Mail saw an increase of 72% on last year.
Top stories in search during the Olympics
Similarweb also carried out an analysis for Press Gazette looking at which news publishers performed well on Google searches for the words "Olympic", "Olympics" and the names of various gold medal winners.
Among the winners on search in the US were Yahoo.com (1.35 million search clicks), USA Today (1.3 million) and NBC News (1.2 million).
In the UK Mail Online secured the most Olympic search traffic, with 644,010 domain clicks. It was followed by The Guardian (462,450) and the BBC (395,110).
The data also reveal the top-ranked URL for each site in the analysis, showing which stories did best on search.
In the UK, the top article at half of the 16 domains assessed covered Imane Khelif or Lin Yu-ting, another boxer whose gender became a focus of abuse online. Other well-performing stories covered the men's tennis finals and a red card for Brazil's all-time leading women's goalscorer. In the US only four of the top stories at the the 18 domains analysed concerned Khelif or Lin: other successful coverage recapped the opening ceremony, covered gymnast Simone Biles or simply tracked the US medal count.
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