Analyst: NBC earned $6 million from online Olympics video

Jordan Golson — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:07:37 -0400

NBC made a mere $5.75 million in revenue on video ads from streaming video on NBCOlympics.com. eMarketer came up with the figure by guesstimating a lot of things: total number of videos streamed, number of ads per stream and the CPM NBC managed to get from its advertisers.

These numbers are a fairly rough estimate, but if they are even close to accurate, it doesn't say much for internet video. Considering the huge amount of money that NBC spent to get broadcast rights for the Olympics -- $894 million -- a $6 million return on a heavily promoted online video investment isn't very impressive. Regardless, streaming tens of millions of videos while requiring viewers to download the Microsoft Silverlight plugin (I'm waiting for a Microsoft spokesperson to get back to me with those numbers) is quite an accomplishment, and Microsoft likely paid a pretty penny for NBC to use Silverlight instead of Adobe's Flash, which adds a wildcard to any sort of revenue estimates.

Regardless of NBC's online video revenue, the company has more than made its money back on the Beijing Games. NBC has hauled in an estimated $1 billion in ad revenue, plus countless brand impressions for NBC Universal-owned stations on cable like Oxygen and Bravo, which also showed various Olympic events. NBC reached an estimated 214 million viewers during the 16-day run, up from 203 million for the Athens games in 2004.

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