Many leading UK news publishers saw a surge in website traffic during the Paris Olympics, data from digital market research firm Similarweb shows.
Meanwhile, US websites saw a decline in visits compared to the previous two weeks, likely because of an assassination attempt on Donald Trump in the weeks leading up to the event and news that Joe Biden would resign as president.
But both the US and UK saw sharp increases in visitor numbers compared to last year, and publishers reported far greater interest in the Paris Games than in the COVID-hit 2021 Tokyo event.
Among the leading British news sites this year, the BBC (5% more visits compared to the previous 18 days), The Independent (10%) and Birmingham Mail (12%) recorded the biggest increases during the 18 days of the Olympic Games.
Publishers report that their traffic for the 2024 Olympic Games doubled in 2021
Mail Sport said it recorded twice as many average daily page views for the 2024 Olympics compared to Tokyo, which were scheduled for summer 2020 but were postponed because of the Covid pandemic and took place without spectators.
The Sun told Press Gazette it had seen 70% more page views for Olympic articles this summer, and The Guardian’s overall page views were 44% higher than during the Tokyo Olympics and 52% higher than in Rio de Janeiro. Daily page views were “higher on every day except one compared to previous Games,” a Guardian spokesperson said.
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In a statement, Geordie Greig, editor of the Independent, said site traffic during the Paris Olympics was “33 percent higher than forecast” and that the title’s coverage of Imane Khelif, a boxer who faced intense online criticism because of her gender, “generated 20 percent of our total Games traffic.”
“Gymnast Simone Biles, sprinter Noah Lyles and British tennis hero Andy Murray have also captured the imagination of our readers,” he said. “Millions of people have read the industry-leading commentary from our correspondents in Paris.”
Mail Sport said it had more than 100 million page views on Olympic-related articles. The publisher added that it had the third most page views per day in the last four years on Tuesday, August 6, when the finals of the men’s 1500m and women’s 200m took place.
According to The Guardian, the fourth day of the Games, July 30, was by far the strongest day, “with Simone Biles and the USA taking gold in the gymnasts’ team final. Other top stories included the Guardian’s medal table, the opening ceremony live blog and news of Imane Khelif, ‘floating surfer’ Gabriel Medina and the disqualification of Vinesh Phogat.”
A spokesman for the New York Times Company said its sports newspaper The Athletic had “two of our 10 biggest weeks ever” during the Paris Olympics.
The Washington Post also stated that the three weeks of the games were “among the five highest-reach weeks of the year in terms of reach across the site, in the app and off-platform.”
The title’s most-read stories included live reports of the events and “articles on important issues,” including the backlash against Khelif.
A spokesperson for the publication said an animated Instagram post about gymnastics routines created by and named after Simone Biles “had a reach of 8.5 million and was a great example of our unique coverage that went beyond the medal count.”
Alex Peake, head of digital sport at The Sun, told Press Gazette that the distribution of traffic this year was “much more even” compared to previous Olympics.
“Direct traffic was up, search traffic was up, and it’s just a slightly more balanced picture than three years ago, when Facebook accounted for almost 50% of the page views we got during Tokyo,” he said.
“I think the Olympics are different from pretty much everything else we cover. If you look at the sports we do day in and day out, like football or boxing, everything follows a pattern.
“The great thing about the Olympic Games, and what makes reporting on them so special, is the fact that we don’t know many of the people we write about and have probably never heard of them.”
Press Gazette examined daily traffic for the period from the top 20 publishers in Press Gazette’s June rankings of the most visited news sites in the US and UK. (Daily traffic data was not available for certain sites: in the UK, ITV, Money Saving Expert, The Times, Healthline, Global, GB News and Daily Record, and in the US, USA Today, Forbes, CNBC, Newsweek and The Guardian.)
(Read more: Advertising block lists unfairly targeted Olympic and European coverage)
In the United States, only two top 20 websites – news.yahoo.com and people.com – saw more traffic during the Olympics than in the weeks leading up to the Games.
However, most news sites analyzed by Press Gazette saw an increase in traffic in the U.S. compared to last year. Fox News, The New York Times, CBS News, NBC News, CNN and BBC.com all saw increases of between 10 and 20 percent, while People.com saw a 46 percent increase in traffic and the Associated Press saw a 63 percent increase.
The same is true in the UK, where four websites – Sky News, The Telegraph, Metro and Birmingham Mail – saw an average increase in page views per day of at least 30%, with the Birmingham Mail seeing a 72% increase year-on-year.
Top stories in searches during the Olympic Games
Similarweb also conducted an analysis for Press Gazette, examining which news publishers performed well in Google searches for the words “Olympic,” “Olympics,” and the names of various gold medalists.
The winners in search in the US included 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 shows the top-ranking URL for each site in the analysis and highlights which stories performed best in search.
In the UK, the top story on half of the 16 domains analyzed was about Imane Khelif or Lin Yu-ting, another boxer whose gender became the target of online abuse. Other successful stories were about the men’s tennis finals and a red card for Brazil’s all-time leading scorer. In the US, only four of the top stories on the 18 domains analyzed were about Khelif or Lin: Other successful stories summarized the opening ceremony, covered gymnast Simone Biles, or simply followed the US medal count.
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