Daily online traffic on the web site of China’s largest broadcaster surpassed that of the leading U.S. broadcaster and online channel during the Olympics, according to WebTrends Analytics.

Spurred by national pride and massive growth in Internet adoption in China, CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games. WebTrends Analytics documented an average of more than 6 million unique visitors each day. In comparison, NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics web site. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

“The Beijing Olympics marked the coming of age for the Internet in China,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions. “CCTV.com attracted more than 100 million online visitors for the Olympic Games by providing the right content at the right time for a large and ever-growing online audience.”

CCTV.com offered more than 3,800 hours of live Olympics webcasts and more than 20,000 additional hours of news, replays and video-on-demand programs throughout the Olympics. WebTrends Analytics, the gold standard for measurement and analysis of large-scale and global web site traffic, uncovered the following visitor highlights and trends:

• An increase of more than 2.5 minutes in the average time each visitor remained on CCTV.com, to nearly 11.5 minutes during the Olympics.
• The opening ceremonies and other activities on Aug. 8 generated the most traffic on any single day, nearly 8.5 million visits. Aug. 9 and Aug. 18, the day Chinese athlete Liu Xiang was scheduled to race in the 110 meter hurdles, attracted the second and third highest visitor counts, respectively.
• The busiest hour of online traffic was from 11 a.m. to noon on Aug. 18. Nearly 900,000 visits were tallied during the hour in which Xiang was scheduled to race. The second busiest hour was during the opening ceremonies.

“Accurate online visitor data is vital when managing an event on this scale,” according to an official statement from CCTV.com, the TV network’s official web site. “The real-time insight we gained each and every day from WebTrends Analytics played an invaluable role in the success of our web site throughout these Games.”

This is the third Olympics that broadcasters have relied on WebTrends technology to help optimize online content on a massive scale. NBC network affiliates around the United States used WebTrends Analytics online insight during the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Greece, and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy.