[opendtv] News: Web Audience for Games Soars for NBC and Yahoo
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:25:33 -0400
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/sports/olympics/25online.html?th&emc=th
Web Audience for Games Soars for NBC and Yahoo
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: August 24, 2008
Steve Ferguson woke up early on Friday - 3 a.m. to be exact - to
watch his stepdaughter Margaux Isaksen, a 16-year-old Olympian,
complete a grueling 11-hour performance in the modern pentathlon.
Mr. Ferguson did not watch Margaux compete in person. From his home
in Fayetteville, Ark., he watched a live stream of her sport on
NBCOlympics.com, where 2,200 live hours of the Summer Olympics were
shown for Internet users.
The ratings for NBC's television coverage of the Games were
record-breaking this month. But the extent to which the Internet
served as a supplement to television was unprecedented, and there
were two clear winners: NBC's own Web site and Yahoo's Olympics
section.
Benefiting from the growth in broadband Internet access,
NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million
video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined
traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006
Games in Turin. The popularity of the site will very likely make
digital rights more significant in next year's bidding for the 2014
and 2016 Games.
As this Olympics demonstrated, the Internet turns the action into a
digital version of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's books,
where every sport can receive its time in the spotlight. Enjoy
cycling? NBC had 90 videos of the competitions by Sunday. Prefer
softball? Yahoo had 186 photos. The Internet is "allowing people to
create their own broader Olympics experience," said Jon Gibs, the
vice president for media analytics at Nielsen Online.
During previous pentathlons, Mr. Ferguson would sometimes have to
wait until a Wednesday to see Margaux's performances from the prior
weekend. "It's really nice to have this available," he said of the
streaming video, even though his connection at home was somewhat slow.
NBC, as the holder of United States rights to the Olympics, was the
sole source for online video and the only media organization that
could use the Olympics logos. But Yahoo, which offered a
feature-oriented mix of news stories and slide shows, gave NBC a run
for its online advertising money, or at least audience, attracting
just as many visitors, according to Nielsen.
"The demand that we're seeing has far exceeded even our wildest
expectations," said Jimmy Pitaro, the head of sports and
entertainment for Yahoo.
Olympics sites operated by AOL, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Beijing
Organizing Committee, The New York Times, and USA Today also had high
levels of traffic, according to Nielsen. They differentiated
themselves from the NBC site by offering slice-of-life features and
entertainment stories. (The top Olympic story on Yahoo this month
was, "Why divers always take showers.")
NBC cites statistics that show its site had a clear advantage over
Yahoo's. But Nielsen Online's numbers show that Yahoo drew an average
of 4.7 million unique visitors a day through Aug. 18, compared with
4.3 million for NBC. The third-ranked site, AOL's Olympics section,
had 1.3 million visitors a day.
NBC treated the Olympics like a research laboratory, and it says it
is gleaning information about how people preferred to consume content
from its combination of television, online and mobile offerings.
(Critics charge that because the network did not stream the most
popular sporting events live, its findings are skewed.) Regardless,
the network is using the Olympics to assert that TV is the preferred
medium of consumers, with the vast majority of viewing - 93 percent -
done via television.
Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC, concluded that many
NBCOlympics.com visitors used the Web site as a video playback
device. "People want to catch up on events that they miss," he told
reporters during a conference call on Aug. 13. "About half say that's
the main reason" they view video. "The second reason," cited by close
to 40 percent, "is that they want to resee and revisit the major
events they had seen on TV earlier."
In 1995, when the media rights to the Beijing Games were awarded, NBC
could not have imagined millions of live video streams of sporting
events, but the company ensured it would own all video rights to the
events, protecting its content no matter what technologies emerged.
NBC's most popular video from Beijing, with 2.3 million views, was
the United States swimming team's 4x100 relay on Aug. 11 featuring
Michael Phelps's second gold medal win.
On Friday the research firm eMarketer estimated that NBC earned $5.75
million in revenue from online video ads, a tiny proportion of the $1
billion in total advertising revenue it raised from the Games. NBC
officials said that Internet advertising revenues could not be
estimated because the ads were sold across various platforms.
Traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked each day around noon as office
workers checked in during the lunch hour. Mr. Gibs said Nielsen also
saw traffic spikes on the last two Monday mornings, presumably as
office workers caught up on Olympics action they might have missed
over the weekend.
NBC's decision to save some popular sports for prime time - up to 12
hours after they have happened - put the network at odds with the
spirit of the Internet, which rewards speed and rejects scarcity.
Americans awakened to breaking news e-mail messages and Web site
headlines revealing the results of gymnastics and track and field
races, but had to wait until bedtime to see the events on television.
Nonaffiliated sites tried to fill that void. On Wednesday, for
example, Yahoo's Olympics blog linked to two Web sites that were
showing BBC video of Usain Bolt's 200-meter race, hours before NBC
showed it on television and placed it on its Web site. Yahoo, which
added a gold medal to its logo for the duration of the Games, used
the power of its popular home page to push visitors to a special
mini-site devoted to the Olympics. Mr. Pitaro said the site more than
tripled its traffic compared with Turin in 2006.
For people like Mr. Ferguson who could not travel to China to watch
family members compete, the Internet allowed them to watch full
coverage in a way that television did not. That was especially true
for sports like the women's pentathlon, which took place over the
course of the day Friday in China.
"It's not real TV-friendly," Mr. Ferguson said. "But now I can watch it."
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