Olympics site as bellwether of global online population

Zia Daniell Wigder | August 26, 2008, 12:19 PM

Yesterday comScore published visitation figures for the official Olympics site Beijing2008.cn during the first 10 days of the event. Much was made of the international nature of the traffic, and indeed, the list of top visitors largely reflects the global distribution of today’s online users (with the obvious exception of China overindexing on site traffic):

A handful of countries with substantial online populations are missing from the visitation list, however, notably Germany (4% of all global users), Russia (3%) and Brazil (3%). Much of this can be attributed to the lack of local-language content for these countries: the site only offered content in Mandarin, English, French, Spanish and Arabic. And as John Yunker pointed out in his blog, the last two languages were added only at the beginning of the Olympics - the last-minute nature of these additions may have resulted in fewer Spanish- and Arabic-speaking visitors to the site.

Overall, the traffic figures provide a good reminder of the global nature of today’s online population and emphasize the importance of local-language content in attracting users.