• by Wayne Friedman , July 29, 2024

Surging past its previous 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics audience results, NBCUniversal says the first three days of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics posted a 79% surge to 34.5 million average viewers across all its platforms, according to its NBCU's Total Audience Delivery measure.

This viewership measure is across the combined live "Paris Prime" (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. prime time (8-11 p.m. EST/PST) time periods.

In contrast, over the first three days in Tokyo Olympics viewership averaged 19.3 million viewers -- an event that took place in the midst of major COVID-19 pandemic disruptions.

NBCU’s Total Audience Delivery comes from live-plus-same day Nielsen custom fast national results and Adobe Analytics, for its digital data.

The live "Paris Prime" viewership measure is inclusive of NBC Television Network, Peacock, USA Network, CNBC, E!, Paris Extra 1, Paris Extra 2, and additional NBCU digital platforms.

U.S. primetime viewership includes NBC, Peacock, and USA Network.

In terms of specific business outcome results, NBCU says that over the three-day period, its advertisers on average had 18% higher attention, 33% greater message recall, and 67% increased likelihood to search due to linear exposure rather than competitive broadcast/cable television.

Overall high-performing advertising categories for attention, recall, and search outcomes included automotive, restaurants and movie studios messaging. 

This data come from iSpot, Marketcast; EDO Ad EnGage and NBCU in-house audience insights.

For NBCU's closely watched Peacock streaming platform, viewership averaged 10.9 million viewers over the three-day period. 

Collectively, over the three-day time period, Peacock amassed 4.5 billion minutes of viewers versus the entire 16 days of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, which total 4.48 million minutes across all NBCU digital platforms.

NBCU says its prime-time unique River Seine Opening Ceremony on Sunday averaged 41.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, nearly double of the opening ceremony for Tokyo Olympics -- 21.7 million.

Among the top individual programs over the three-day period was the U.S. men’s basketball team's win over Serbia, averaging 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. This opening round Olympics U.S.-Serbia basketball game bested the gold medal game in Tokyo, which took in 9.3 million viewers.