Dive Brief:
- The growing number of consumers using digital alternatives like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram to follow the Olympics is making it difficult for TV networks to recoup their spending on broadcast licensing fees, Fortune reports.
- While the International Olympic Committee estimates that the Rio 2016 Games' worldwide audience was about the same as London 2012, Comcast's NBC Universal said that its viewership was down 8.6%.
- “Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook are all sucking the bejesus out of the market,” Steve Allen, a former advertising buyer for Japanese agency Dentsu, told Fortune. “They’re taking increasing shares (of the advertising revenue) and that share has to come from someone.”
Dive Insight:
While the linear TV Olympics audience for the Rio Games is expected to be similar to the 2012 London Games, those numbers are a drop from the 2008 Beijing Games. But just because overall viewership from this year is similar to four years ago doesn't mean that things haven't changed: Digital streaming and second screening activities have eaten into TV's Olympics dominance, with a growing number of consumers following the games on digital platforms.
While Comcast's NBCUniversal reports TV viewership of the games is significantly down, this year's Olympics boasted record numbers for digital live streaming. TV broadcasters in Europe were less concerned about the drop in viewership — at least partly because of the time zone difference between London and Rio.
Social media platforms across the board added features to help users find and enjoy Olympic content, such as special filters offered by Facebook and Snapchat and custom emojis from Twitter. But marketers not on the official sponsor list were prohibited from using social media to take directly advantage of the games through the IOC’s Rule 40. The rule caused confusion among marketers about what they are and aren't allowed to say on social media during the Olympics.