Who’s Watching The Olympics On TV?

I was shocked to hear FOX’s American Idol beat NBC’s Olympics coverage, in the ratings race, by over three million people. It begs the question –  are people abandoning TV in favour of getting their Olympics fix via the web?

People’s ready adoption of web sport coverage was apparent during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing when Yahoo! Sports attracted more than 38.5 million people during August. The search engine beat NBColympics.com (the official broadcaster of the Games) by 15 million unique visitors.

No wonder then that broadcasters and news organizations have expanded their online presence to compete for valuable online viewers.

The implicit social media assets of online coverage have been identified as the reason for the swathes of people moving to the web; and the rapidly dwindling advertising revenues of traditional TV broadcasters.

For the 2010 Games, the Canadian Olympic Committee gave media accreditation to web-based agencies, citizen journalists and bloggers. While the number of online journalists went up, the number of accredited traditional journalists went down; a telling sign.

Yahoo! continues to be innovative and interactive for the Winter Games. You should check out their Olympic mobile site, FanCouver, in Yaletown (1128 Hamilton St). It’s a place where fans attending the games can interact online, drink hot chocolate, play games, get prizes, and daily sports analysis from a Yahoo! sports reporter. Plus, you can meet Elvis Stojko, former Olympic figure skater. Mike Agerbo spoke to Elvis Stojko at FanCouver and we’ll post that interview soon. Stay tuned!

Yahoo! stated that their Olympic site attracted 9.3 million unique visitors. Apparently that’s the largest online audience for the first week of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. It surpasses NBC’s Olympics online coverage of 7.6 million unique visitors. Yahoo! Sports finished the first week of the Games with more than 17.5 million total unique visitors, more than double the visitors to its nearest competitors.

It makes you wonder: Will a television station be the official broadcaster for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, or will it be an online institution?

Source: GetConnected