According to a 16-market survey conducted by Nielsen after the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies, consumers throughout the world are increasingly interested in traveling to mainland China. 

Forty-five percent of those surveyed after the Opening ceremony said they intended to travel to mainland China at some point.  Following the Closing Ceremony, that percentage increased to 51%.  For 80% of the respondents, who had never visited mainland China, it would their first trip to the country.

Meanwhile, respondents who said they had no interest in visiting mainland China dropped from one-third, after the Opening Ceremony, to one-quarter, following the Closing Ceremony. 

Interest in visiting mainland China was highest in neighboring Hong Kong (86%), Singapore (86%), and India (80%).  Large percentages of repondents in Mexico (72%), Taiwan (69%), South Africa (69%) and South Korea (66%) also expressed desire to travel to China.

Positive impressions of China, generated by global Olympics TV coverage, may account for the surging interest in travel to the country, Grace Pan, head of leisure and travel research, Nielsen China, noted. 

“According to the World Tourism Organization, China will be the world’s largest tourist destination by 2020 receiving 137 million overseas tourists in 2020, and in the meantime and generating 100 million outbound tourists of their own,” Pan said.  “With the Beijing Olympics generating such strong interest in China, they may well reach these numbers earlier than anticipated.”

View the full press release.

Read China Daily’s coverage of Nielsen’s findings.

According to a survey conducted by Nielsen after the closing ceremony, seven in 10 viewers across 16 countries and territories said Beijing appeared more “modern” and “high-tech” than they had expected.

Beijing also looked cleaner and greener than many viewers expected — 56% said the city’s physical environment exceeded their expectations.

Nine in 10 foreigners who visited Beijing for the Olympics also told Nielsen the city’s Olympics venues were “good” or “very good.”

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Read The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Nielsen’s findings.

Between August 8 and August 24, 4.7 billion viewers — or 70% of the world’s population — tuned in to watch the Games, according to Nielsen.  In comparison, 3.9 billion watched the 2004 Athens Games, while 3.6 billion followed the 2000 Sydney Games on TV. 

Host nation China led the viewing with 94% of Chinese viewers tuning in to the Olympics TV coverage, Nielsen reported.  South Korea, though a much less populous nation, also recorded 94% audience reach.  Mexico followed closely with 93% of all viewers in that country following the Olympics on TV.

In the U.S., the Summer Games ranked as the most-viewed TV event ever, with a total audience of 211 million and an average daily audience of 27 million people.

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in The Hollywood Reporter, Multichannel News, The Huffington Post, and on Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Olympics fans who logged on to the Internet to follow the events around the clock set a new online precedent during the Games,  Nielsen Online reported Wednesday.

Olympics Web Portals
In the U.S., NBC, an official broadcast partner for the event, drew an average of 18 million (week one) to 18.9 million unique visitors (week two) to its Olympics website during the Games.

Yahoo’s Olympics section drove more traffic than NBC’s site, but visitors to NBCOlympics.com spent twice as much time on the site and looked at three times more content than visitors to Yahoo’s Olympics site, according to Nielsen.

In China, approximately 85% of all Internet users who went online during the Games viewed Olympics content, according to ChinaRank, a website ranking platform hosted by the Internet Society of China and a Nielsen Online partner.

On average, 62 million unique browsers viewed Olympics content each day, and during the course of the Games, Chinese Internet users viewed more than 11.4 billion pages of content across 200 Olympics-related sites tracked by ChinaRank.

Sina Olympics was easily the most popular Olympics Web portal among Chinese Internet users, drawing an average of 30.9 million unique browsers each day.  Tencent Olympics (17.9 million average daily browsers) and Sohu Olympics (12.5 million average daily browers) were, respectively, the second- and third-ranked Chinese Olympics Web portals.

Online Video
NBC’s Olympics video site drew more than 1.2 million unique visitors per day, with dramatic traffic spikes around noon on work days.  Online video use was significant during the Beijing Games, but it did not appear to negatively affect TV viewing in the U.S., which remained at record levels during the Games.

Olympics Buzz
U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps’ dramatic gold-medal winning streak triggered a barrage blog chatter.  Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt also wowed Olympics fans, but Phelps, who received five times more online buzz than Bolt, proved unbeatable in the blogsphere.

Online Advertising
U.S. Olympics team sponsors drove 9.9 billion online ad impressions before and during the Beijing Games (August 4 – 24).  AT&T, General Motors, and Bank of America were the top three advertisers, accounting for a combined total of more than 1 billion impressions.

View Nielsen’s complete Olympics online findings.

The Beijing Games surpassed the old record- 209 million viewers of the 1996 Games in Atlanta- on Saturday night. Through Saturday, 211 million viewers had watched at least some of the Games on any of NBC Universal’s networks.

On Saturday, 43 million viewers tuned in to at least a portion of NBC’s coverage. The average audience from 9 to 11 p.m. on Saturday night was 16.5 million. Typically, the Games had attracted 27 million or more viewers per night leading up to Saturday.

Global television broadcasts during the first ten days of the Games (August 8 – 17) attracted a cumulative TV audience of 4.4 billion viewers — or almost two-thirds of the world’s population, according to Nielsen.

In contrast, the 2004 Athens Summer Games attracted a total of 3.9 billion viewers worldwide, while the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney drew 3.6 billion total viewers.

Nielsen’s global audience estimates are based on data collected from 38 markets by Nielsen, AGB Nielsen Media Research, BBM Nielsen Media Research, Finnpanel, IBOPE, TAM India, and OzTAM.

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings by the Xinhua News Agency, the Times of India, and Current.

Between August 8 and 21, Phelps was the most-buzzed about Olympic athlete — with a 38% share of all blog posts about gold medal winners, according to Nielsen Online.

Jamaican runner Usain Bolt (5.04% share) and American gymnast Shawn Johnson (3.75% share) were the second and third most buzzed-about athletes, respectively, Nielsen reported.

Gymnast Nastia Liukin, basketball players Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, swimmers Jason Lezak and Alain Bernard, and tennis players Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal rounded out Nielsen’s list of the ten most-blogged about Olympic athletes.

The top two U.S.-based Olympics online destinations, Yahoo Olympics and NBC Olympics, drew an average of 4.7 million and 4.3 million unique visitors each day between August 8 and August 18.

According to Nielsen, Olympics-related websites in the U.S. are drawing slightly larger audiences on work days than weekends. 

Nielsen also reported that daily traffic to NBC’s Olympics site typically peaked at noon during the first work week of the Games (August 11 – 15), as U.S. fans logged on during their lunch hours to check for news and updates.

View the full press release.

Read the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Nielsen’s findings.

During the first week of competition, an average of 930,000 fans per day, from ten countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, visited Beijing2008.cn, the official Website of the Beijing Games, according to Nielsen.  On several days during that period, traffic to the site exceeded one million unique visitors.

Within China, traffic to Beijing2008.cn, averaged 1.5 million unique browsers per day during the period, according to ChinaRank, Nielsen’s China-based Internet traffic measurement partner.

In the U.S., daily traffic to the video section of NBC’s Olympics site averaged more than 1.5 million unique visitors from home and work, according to Nielsen.  During the same period in Brazil, traffic to the Olympics video section of Terra averaged 119,000 unique visitors from home.  NBC and Terra are both Olympics broadcast partners.

Meanwhile, in China, more than one-quarter of China’s estimated 250 million Internet users viewed Olympics-related online content on a daily basis, according to ChinaRank.  

In all, during the first week of the Games, Chinese Internet users viewed more than 4.6 billion Olympics-related Web pages. 

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter.