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 4×100 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.”
