Broadcasters Utilizing New Metrics to Track Olympic Viewership

(ATR) Forget traditional television network ratings, the age of new media is here.

This is the philosophy two of the biggest Olympic host broadcasters – Eurosport and NBC – have employed when determining the total audience reach of this year’s Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

For Eurosport, the host broadcaster in Europe owned by Discovery Communications, its ‘Total Video’ metric measures user engagement across all screens, including traditional primetime coverage and mobile devices. Eurosport is reporting 212 million users engaging with their Olympic coverage across all platforms in this new metric.

The European broadcaster is also reporting 1.1 million engagements on various social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter.

To bolsters its Olympic coverage, Eurosport launched ‘Eurosport Cube’, an augmented reality studio featuring Olympic athletes such as Bode Miller. The popular ‘Topless Tongan’ Pita Taufatofua is also contributing to Eurosport’s coverage with a daily video diary series.

In the United States, NBC is using its Total Audience Delivery metric that was also employed for the Rio 2016 Summer Games. This measurement considers broader media consumption by calculating average minute viewing across broadcast, cable, and digital platforms.

NBC’s TAD at PyeongChang 2018 peaked during coverage of the Opening Ceremony on Feb. 9, with a whopping TAD of 28.3 million viewers. The first Sunday of competition, Feb. 11, also had a large TAD of 26 million viewers.

Each day of the PyeongChang 2018 Games has topped a total audience of 22 million people. By comparison, NBC’s average TAD for the Rio 2016 Games was 27.5 million.

Despite the relative dip in audience reach, Ad Age reports that NBC is surprised by the TAD achieved thus far in PyeongChang and has more advertising space available as a result.

"We are on a pace right now where the inventory we held aside for potential under-delivery of our estimates is not going to be needed," NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus said on a conference call this week.

"We still have the ability to go back into the market and sell more," Lazarus said. "If you want to sell your product in the next two weeks, we are the window to consumers."

NBC said that it can close deals worth more than $900 million in ad sales revenue before the Olympics conclude Feb. 25 in South Korea.

Written by Kevin Nutley

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