NBC will continue to ride a high of prime-time viewers and advertising units into the sunset of 2008, but that won’t stop online gnats from trying to rain on their earnings parade.
eMarketer released numbers today stating that video advertising is contributing a pretty small piece of the pie to NBC advertising revenue.
Video ad spending on the NBCOlympics.com site will reach only $5.75 million, a pretty paltry sum compared to the over $1 billion that NBC is taking in overall.
NBC sacrificed online earnings when they made their push to hold the bulk of Olympics events, but it appears that their high traffic numbers were unrelated to video watching. Even with the ongoing interest in all things Olympics and the prevalence of photo finishes in this year’s events, it looks like viewers weren’t so interested in downloading the Silverlight player or watching Olympics clips on NBCOlympics.com.
$5.75 million is only 1.1 percent of this year's online video ad spending projection of $505 million in the U.S. NBC had proprietary access to online footage in the states, but it looks like consumers weren’t buying it.
