August 11th, 2008
The Olympics Watch: Not That Much
The Internet did not break, melt or probably even much notice the Olympics, in its first weekend.
On Saturday, for instance, only about 4.8 million people watched 3.1 million video streams. On Sunday, 5.1 million watched 3.4 million.
Here are the first three days totals:
These are interesting in a couple ways:
• Huddling up. The stats indicate that friends and family do watch the computer screen at the same time. On average, about 1.5 people are huddled around each computer screen, when a stream is being played.
• Short attention span. Most viewers are not watching complete soccer games or other events. Average time spent on the site is just starting to reach 15 minutes, at atime.
But back to the overall traffic. Let’s put 3.1 million streams in one day in perspective.
Google’s video sites typically deliver more than 4 billion views, in a month. YouTube accounts for 98% of that, according to comScore. Which means in the latest figures released, that YouTube delivered 4.1 billion views in one month.
That translates to roughly 132 million videos viewed off YouTube’s servers, every day in May.
So, Saturday’s NBC Olympics streaming total was about 2% of that.
Which seems to be a recurring number for online viewing of the Olympics. According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, only about 2% of NBC’s Olympics audience watched online streams exclusively.
Now, it’s on to Day Four: The first day of the work week. We’ll see whether the in-office watching becomes statistically significant.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is editor-in-chief of Securities Industry News, as well as a long-time media, technology and business journalist. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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