Lively Olympic coverage and innovative blog bring big audience to Reuters.com

Great sporting action, comprehensive Olympics coverage and lively stories from China drove big crowds to Reuters.com, keeping traffic high during the traditional quiet periods of August. A full-time moderator for ‘The View from the Bird’s Nest,’ blog which ran for the three week period around the Games, ensured we had more than 200 posts, including 16 podcasts, that generated hundreds of thousands of page views and more than 1,400 comments, making it second only in popularity to the long-established and well-regarded U.S. political blog ‘Tales from the Trail.’ Most popular posts included Who is the greatest Olympian? and Who’s top of the medals table? This year page views for the Olympic section on Reuters.com were up 62 percent on viewership in Athens 2004. Over the Olympics period Reuters global sites were up 10.7% in visits and up 18.8% in page views versus the prior 4 similar periods of time. That is all the more remarkable given that the summer normally sees a dip in online traffic.