Australia beats Great Britain in Olympics ... in online ratings

LONDON - Australia has finally topped Great Britain in an Olympic poll, by delivering more unique users a day to the official website of the Beijing games.

Australia usually prides itself on performing better at the Olympics than Great Britain but this year has had to face up to a drubbing in terms of the gold medal count.

That hasn't stopped the country's sports fans from taking a keen interest, with research published by Nielsen Online today showing that during the first week of the games the average daily unique audience to from Australia was 71,300, compared with 54,000 visitors from Britain.

However, both countries trailed behind the US, which accounted for 554,800 visitors a day to the site, and France, with 123,000, although the figures cover the period before the British gold rush began in earnest.

Within China, traffic to the site averaged at about 1.5m unique users a day during the first week, with record-breaking swimmer Michael Phelps proving a huge draw for the host nation's web users, according to research complied by Nielsen in conjunction with ChinaRank.

Jon Gibs, vice-president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said: "Michael Phelps is clearly the global story of these games. Online news, information and video have allowed fans from all over the world to follow his record-breaking performances and watch history in the making."

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