• by Jonathan Blum , April 18, 2006

It's old news by now: NBC's television coverage of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics was a five-ring flop. Prime-time coverage got spanked by "American Idol" and other programs.

The Web, on the other hand, carried the torch. Traffic at NBCOlympics.com broke records. And TV's new nemesis, Web video, grew exponentially. Did another bit of the old media Berlin Wall fall to online? Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. A comparison of post-Olympics Web and television data tells a subtler story. Web traffic was indeed up, but it was a fraction of the total TV audience. And while prime-time ratings were soft, more than 80 percent of American TV households tuned in to at least some of the coverage.

More strikingly, the supposed killer online media application, streaming video, was marginal next to old-school television. "At the end of the day, when compared to the total TV audience, [Web video] was really peanuts," says Mike Zeman, vice president of media and analytics at Starcom IP.

Olympic Gap

Web marketers know that online measurement is a competitive sport in itself. With the Turin coverage there were major discrepancies among the data produced by competing ratings services.

NBC, using data provided by WebTrends, reported that over the 17 days of the event, NBCOlympics.com published 361 million page views to roughly 15 million unique users. Nielsen/NetRatings logged 275 million pages and 8 million users for the entire month of February, and comScore Media Metrics reported just 128 million pages viewed by about 6 million unique users.

NBC declined to comment on the data. But Brent Hieggelke, vice president of marketing at WebTrends, says NBC used server logs that account for all traffic but can't account for the same user viewing a feed on different computers.

Representatives for comScore and Nielsen say they use smaller, statistically valid samples called panel data, which compensate for issues such as double PC viewing. But they admit that their data don't directly account for all traffic.

TV Gets the Gold

Whether 15 million or 6 million Americans used nbcOlympics.com, that's still a fraction of the television audience.

Despite the steep drop in average prime-time ratings -- from 19.1 household points in 2002 for Salt Lake City to 12.1 for Turin -- NBC still claimed an impressive 184 million individual viewers for at least some of the games.

Television usage not only dwarfed Web consumption in terms of total users, it bested the Web's reach. Those 184 million TV viewers sampled nearly 340 unduplicated hours of programming across all NBC networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, while NBCOlympics.com provided 9.1 million video streams out of nearly 125,000 hours of content. And Web video usage is decidedly different than television: Small numbers of viewers account for a large amount of traffic.

"Video usage online can coalesce around the passionate user, with heavy users doing most of the downloading," says Greg Smith, executive vice president, media insights, at Carat Fusion, a digital media planning firm.

What then is the chance of reaching an individual user online? It seems fairly small.

"From a target rating point perspective, it is valid to say the Olympics was still a television event," Zeman says.