NBC has been doing gangbusters business on television and well enough online with the Olympics, but there is some evidence that their bottleneck approach might be sending considerable numbers of potential web eyeballs — and advertisers — elsewhere.
Traffic to NBCOlympics.com has been high, but during last week's Michael Phelps-a-thon -- during which NBC recorded higher ratings for one of the swimming star's events than even for the opening ceremony -- Yahoo's Olympics site edged ahead in viewers, with 8 million unique viewers to NBC Olympics.com's 6.7 million, according to ComScore.
Now CNET's Chris Matyszczyk is hearing that advertisers are dissatisfied with NBC's online content and looking for other venues to spend their ad dollars:
The chief advantage of NBCOlympics.com is exclusive video of the events themselves. Yahoo is aggregating featurish video from a variety of sources, including local US TV stations, that matches the softer NBC offerings and speaks to the subject, and for many people its almost a publisher of record online as one of the oldest and most consistently reliable news sites on the web.
Still, NBC's monopoly on event video isn't providing the commanding numbers it might have hoped for, and we'll never know if a diametrically-opposed viral strategy would have paid better dividends. And, as has been widely observed, NBC's strategy of saving new content for prime-time has boosted TV ratings but also frustrated online users looking for live content.
As the numbers continue to roll in, it will be interesting to see if online advertisers are equally frustrated by NBC's approach or just following the money by looking for additional avenues to capitalize on the unexpected popularity of this year's Games.
See Also:
- Zucker Still Looking for Loose Change on the Internet
- Take That, Bloggers: NBC Laughs All the Way To the Bank
- Teens Totally Not Into Olympics
- Phelps Beats Fireworks in Viewers
- P2p Sites Bring Home Loads of Olympic Gold
