Here is another good measure of sports popularity using internet traffic, though it only includes Summer Olympic Games sports. The analysis is of internet traffic to each sport section of the IOC website during 2004, which included the period of the Athens Olympic Games.
Since then, after the 2008 Olympics the sports of Baseball and Softball were dropped from the program and in 2016 golf and rugby are set to return. The popularity of sports may have changed since the time this data was collected.
There are a other few lists of the world's popular sports using internet traffic statistics - based onwikipedia sport pages and google search terms. There are also more rankings of popular Olympic Sports, the ranking of most widely played Olympic Sport based on the number of National Federations and the most popular Olympic Sport based on the number of articles published.
Total Page Views to the IOC Website Sections
The table below uses data from the Olympic Program Commission, Report to the 117th IOC Session from 24 May 2005. The data presented is the number of visits to the sport's pages of the IOC website from January 2004 to 11 February 2005. The sport the most visited page is the aquatics page, which includes swimming, diving, water polo and synchronized swimming. This is the same top four sports as the analysis of articles published, though in a different order. This sports ranking is different from the popularity ofwikipedia sport pages, reflecting the apparent temporary popularity of sports such as swimming, athletics and gymnastics at Olympic time.
| Rank | Sport | Page Views | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aquatics | 431378 | 10.1 |
| 2 | Gymnastics | 323581 | 7.6 |
| 3 | Athletics | 308596 | 7.2 |
| 4 | Football (Soccer) | 178418 | 4.2 |
| 5 | Volleyball | 176042 | 4.1 |
| 6 | Equestrian | 171517 | 4.0 |
| 7 | Basketball | 163954 | 3.8 |
| 8 | Cycling | 143388 | 3.4 |
| 9 | Shooting | 134099 | 3.1 |
| 10 | Wrestling | 128027 | 3.0 |
| 11 | Archery | 127830 | 3.0 |
| 12 | Taekwondo | 119570 | 2.8 |
| 13 | Modern Pentathlon | 106858 | 2.5 |
| 14 | Tennis | 106297 | 2.5 |
| 15 | Fencing | 105659 | 2.5 |
| 16 | Judo | 103671 | 2.4 |
| 17 | Weightlifting | 101285 | 2.4 |
| 18 | Canoe-kayak | 95637 | 2.2 |
| 19 | Badminton | 92591 | 2.2 |
| 20 | Handball | 91071 | 2.1 |
| 21 | Baseball | 90840 | 2.1 |
| 22 | Field Hockey | 87395 | 2.1 |
| 23 | Rowing | 82834 | 1.9 |
| 24 | Sailing | 79716 | 1.9 |
| 25 | Triathlon | 68937 | 1.9 |
| 26 | Table Tennis | 65159 | 1.8 |
| 27 | Softball | 59570 | 1.6 |
| 28 | Boxing | 13920 | 1.0 |
Table data source: IOC - Olympic Program Commission, Report to the 117th IOC Session, 24 May 2005.
