(Reuters) Olympic sponsor and advertiser Chevrolet, a unit of General Motors Corp, posted an 88 percent increase to 70,700 average daily visitors to its site for the week ended February 10, according to research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.
Telecommunications firm Qwest scored a 54 percent increase in visitors to its site for a daily average of 84,000. Average daily visitors to Monster.com, a unit of TMP Worldwide , increased 16 percent, to 988,000.
The Winter Olympics have pulled in record numbers of viewers for NBC, a unit of General Electric , with all-time high ratings for the opening ceremony and improvements over the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, for subsequent days.
NBC has benefited from increased live coverage from Utah compared with both the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and the Nagano Games, when the huge time difference between the Olympic venues and the United States forced tape-delay coverage.
Before the Games began, the network said it surpassed its target of $720 million in advertising sales for the 375 hours of programming on NBC and its sister cable networks MSNBC and CNBC.
Jupiter said visitors to NBC's Olympics Web site (http://www.nbcolympics.com) totaled 393,200 average daily visitors for the week ended February 10, with the Salt Lake City Olympics site (http://www.saltlake2002.com) pulling in 248,600 average daily visitors.
