Top Olympics site? Yahoo, NBC tell different stories
Don Day August 23rd, 2008
Despite big TV promotion, prominent placement on MSN and MSNBC.com, 211 affiliates cranking towards it and exclusive video, NBCOlympics.com isn’t the top Olympics news site - that crown goes to Yahoo.
Silicon Alley Insider quotes Nielsen Online data for the sites - which shows from August 8 - August 18, Yahoo Olympics beat NBC Olympics for eight out of 11 days. In aggregate, Yahoo Olympics edged NBCO in average users by about 10%.
SAI published that report on August 20. Earlier that same day, an NBCU media relations person sent out a release touting NBCO’s big win over Yahoo. So what gives? The NBCU announcement only used NIELSEN data through 8/10/2008 - even though the release was sent 20 days later. It then mushed in some Hitwise data and swished it all around to paint a bright picture. NBC’s release is at best misleading - and as Wired notes, even Hitwise says Yahoo had more users to its site… something NBC left out of its news release.
Read the NBC release after the jump.
(Disclosure: I’ve been generating content for NBCO’s OZone program for KTVB & KTFT. We also have a content sharing agreement with MSNBC.com).
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NBCOLYMPICS.COM ON MSN RANKS #1 AMONG ALL OLYMPICS WEB SITES
398% Ahead of Nearest Competitor Yahoo in Page Views and Nearly Triples Average Visit Time
Close to 42 Million Unique Users Online, Over 56 Million Video Streams, Almost 6 Million Mobile Visits
BEIJING – Aug. 20, 2008 –NBCOlympics.com on MSN ranks No. 1 in among all Olympics websites in total users, page views and average visit time out delivering No.2 Yahoo’s site in each metric, according to the most recent available data provided by Nielsen Online for week ending 8/10/08. The multi-platform momentum grows as fans continue to tune in and log on to the Beijing Olympics in record numbers. After just 12 days, NBCOlympics.com on MSN continues to set records for unique users, page views and video streams, with nearly 42 million unique users having visited the site, viewing 912 million pages and watching more than 56 million video streams. NBCOlympics.com’s mobile WAP and other wireless VOD offerings continue to attract audiences like never before, attracting close to 6 million visits to date.
Key digital highlights include:
· NBCOlympics.com was the No. 1 destination among Olympics-related sites out-delivering Yahoo! Olympics by 389% in page views and eight percent in average unique users for the week ending 8/10/2008 according to data provided by Nielsen Online. NBCOlympics.com’s audience consumed significantly more content, spending an average of 11:53 minutes per person on NBCOlympics.com, versus only 4:18 on Yahoo. Data for week ending 8/17/08 will be available tomorrow according to Nielsen.
· NBCOlympics.com ranks No. 1 in terms of share of page views versus all Olympics-related sites since the start of the Games through Monday, Aug. 18, according to Hitwise. Users are highly engaged with NBCOlympics.com, consuming more pages and spending more time there than on any other site.
o Through Monday, Aug 18. NBCOlympics.com scores the highest share of page views among Olympics-related sites, more than doubling its closest competitor, Yahoo! Olympics. NBCOlympics.com has received 66.1% of all page views among all Olympic sites versus Yahoo! Olympics’ 26.9%. Users are also spending more than twice as much time per visit on NBCOlympics.com throughout the Games (15:50 minutes per average daily visit) than on Yahoo’s Olympics section (6:49 minutes).
· NBCOlympics.com on MSN attracts close to 6 and a half million users daily, who have already watched more than 6 million hours of video content. On average, users are staying more than 13 minutes per visit and spend more than 27 minutes when consuming video. Video consumption averages 27 minutes per viewer.
· The audience on alternative platforms skews younger and more male. Online data provided by Quantcast indicates that of the total NBCOlympics.com audience, 55% are male and 30% are 18-34. On mobile, 70% of the audience is male and 42% are 18-34 years old, according to a study facilitated by MobileVerbs.
· Video viewing remains strong. Almost 10 million users have watched over 56 million total streams so far. Compared to the ENTIRE Torino and Athens games combined, this represents a 493% and 1967% increase in streams respectively.
· Visits to NBC Olympics Mobile WAP site has generated over 25 million page views, with users spending close to 6 minutes per visit.
· Widgets usage has exploded in popularity, generating 200 thousand unique placements across the web and more than 70 million impressions.
· Since the Games began, Mobile VOD subscribers watch an average of 2.5 clips apiece.
· The most popular sports on NBCOlympics.com on MSN to date are Gymnastics, Swimming, Track & Field, Basketball and Beach Volleyball.
Online statistics provided by Omniture, online demographics provided by Quantcast, widget statistics provided by Clearspring, online competitive data provided by Nielsen Online and Hitwise.
Members of the media can get more information about NBC Universal and its programming on the NBC Universal Media Village Web site at www.nbcumv.com.
14 Comments Add your own
1. nico | August 23rd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I’d be curious what NBC’s SEO strategy was for thier OZone sites…if there was any strategy at all. When you googled Michael Phelps not one url containing “nbc” came up last week on the first results page.
2. Don Day | August 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I’ve been very disappointed in the SEO for OZone.
3. discreet_chaos | August 23rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I have to say that I’ve referenced nbcolympics for the listings, but I’ve never read anything else and I’ve even been accessing the listings directly, via my browser’s history file.
While on the other hand, Yahoo! is set as my homepage and I’ve clicked several Olympics-oriented headlines on their site. So, sorry NBC, but there’s more clicks from me to Yahoo! than there was to your official site.
4. Rod Overton | August 23rd, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I seem to recall during my IBS days that when IB was essentially doing the Olympics web sites that those were always — consistently — THE place to go for coverage (and that the IBS network exposure helped fuel that.)
I would only assume that seeing this recent
weakess — during an extremely compelling weeks of games — that the lack of IBS’ involvement this time around might have some issues…
I’m sort of out of the IB loop (since proudly serving as M.E. in Raleigh at WRAL for 2 years) and am not sure at what point IB ‘lost the olympics’ and it has faded away…
5. Randy | August 23rd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Having worked with an NBC affiliate since the first “OZone” this one was the best as far as content and local opportunities. But getting ads and content posted was an issue. IB was much quicker to get it done. Ads were not posted quickly and at times NBCU would replace local stories on our site with national stories. Come on, why did we send our anchor to China so their story on “our page” could get dropped for some story NBC could easily have promoted anywhere on the national site. And what about those cute panda bear’s our, anchor spent a lot of time on the story and NBC said “not Olympics related, you can’t post”. Oh well more people watched our Olympic video on our site than on our Olympic Zone. Of course that depends on whose numbers you believe on page views.
6. Anonymous | August 24th, 2008 at 3:22 am
The Cuban guy that kicked the ref in the head had the nearly-right idea, bad execution….;-ppp
I’m glad this crap is over and hope it never comes back. Knight Rider would be back much sooner.
7. tdc | August 24th, 2008 at 6:05 am
OZone looks like OZ one.
that’s the new 767 dorothy and toto will be piloting instead of that crappy bicycle in the new “Wizard2010″ coming to a theater near you.
8. JL | August 24th, 2008 at 6:22 am
I have to tell you, I absolutely loved Yahoo!’s coverage of the olympics. And this is coming from someone who even works at an NBC (and IB) affiliate.
They covered the medal count and all the same stuff as the Ozone, but where they really shined were the quirky blogs and content like “Fourth Place Medal”.
I’m sure that there was stuff similar on Ozone, but I didn’t want to hunt for it. I just went right to the front page of Yahoo! and there always seemed to be something interesting or clever there.
9. Don Day | August 24th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Randy -
I was working a late night shift when a Boise girl was in the cycling road race. She won the event and I wrote a quick stub piece to get it up and linked. In the time I wrangled everything else that needed to be done and wrote a longer local story - NBCO replaced my stub with a (shorter, less local) AP story. Then their tool CRASHED so my superior local story didn’t post for hours. It was 12:30am and I just about hit the roof.
10. Stephan | August 24th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Don and Randy,
Glad to know that I wasn’t the only one rankled constantly by the seeming arbitrary “guidelines” the NBCU staff used to determine what was “worthy” of the Ozone. We had a great story that talked about how overworked some of the Opening Ceremony participants were… Of course, it was deemed “too critical of the Olympics” and thus should be posted on our main news site, and not the Ozone… plltt!!
Did either of you have access to the EBO (the REAL Ozone backend)? That took care of any issues as far as getting content posted, as it went on immediately - give or take a few minutes - after we hit publish. Our staff in Beijing (except our internet only reporter) used the Ozone Support site for blogging, and as you noted, we less than thrilled with the turn around time…
And don’t get me started on getting video approved..
11. Don Day | August 24th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
We used EBO - which is the worst CMS I’ve ever used… and trust me… I know a bad CMS.
The rules were almost funny. And don’t get ME started on the day they told us to take video off our legacy news site…
12. Barney Lerten | August 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
We decided early on not to get in line to post Olympic content on our OZone page, that we wanted the views on our own pages, thank you very much (not that we had a lot of local athletes taking part.) We DID offer a good-sized link to the page, however, above our fold.
Anyway, despite that, in the daily rankings, for whatever odd reason, we in Mkt. 192 were finishing regularly in the daily rankings at 140-160 or so, so obviously some other stations were doing even less.
What I DID like and we finally added a week or so in was the large headline-set and scroller NBCOlympics widget we put in col. 4 on our WorldNow site (we’d have put it above-fold if it woulda worked in our layout;-/
13. discreet_chaos | August 24th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I’m finding the nuts & bolts discussion of Olympics coverage both informative and entertaining, but I just read the NYTimes story about the website ratings and I just wanted to let NBC know that I didn’t stream any events because everytime I looked, it was tennis, judo or fencing and those aren’t exactly the sports that I wanted to see.
Oh, and as JL and someone in the Times (click my name) noted; The breeziness and accesibilty of Yahoo’s coverage is what attracted me. I probably could’ve said the same about some of the stories mentioned in this thread, but apparently they were nixed and because I had no reason to hang-out on NBCO, I probably wouldn’t have seen them, anyway.
14. Anonymous | August 26th, 2008 at 3:01 am
I guess we can appreciate that Mark Johnson has been concerned to tell us how to get into Vancouver, Canada without passport hassles or stay in Washington state…
Two years early.
Well, two more years on the NBC Olympics “bug” on the screen. I miss Jim McKay 100% more.
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