NBC Faces Ratings Nightmare With Beijing Olympics: What Went Wrong?

The Beijing Winter Olympics are turning into a ratings disaster for Comcast Corp. CMCSA, with viewership for the NBC televised broadcasts at nearly half the level they were four years ago.

What Happened: Bloomberg reported an average of 12.3 million nightly viewers per day have watched the Winter Olympics on Comcast’s NBCUniversal TV and streaming channels from their launch on Feb. 4 through Feb. 8. In comparison, approximately 23 million viewers were watching the 2018 games from PyeongChang, South Korea, during the same time period.

Bloomberg cited unnamed “people familiar with the matter” in reporting NBC anticipated roughly 40% fewer viewers than four years ago and whittled down its advertising rates by a similar amount. This was done to avoid a reprise of the problems that arose last summer with the Tokyo Olympics when ratings were lower than anticipated and NBC was forced to give additional commercial time to advertisers.

NBC generated $920 million in national advertising sales for the PyeongChang games and turned a profit. The network declined to offer a revenue forecast for the Beijing games.

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Why It Happened: The decline in viewership can be attributed to multiple factors, ranging from the declining number of Americans watching broadcast television to having the Beijing games six months after the Tokyo games to the controversy over China’s human rights abuses.

Still, NBC is confident it can buffer itself from financial woes by spreading its Olympics coverage across Comcast's multiple platforms.

“Is there a scenario where we make as much, if not more? Yeah, there’s a scenario,” Dan Lovinger, NBCUniversal’s president of advertising sales and partnerships, who added the Olympics are “going almost exactly as we suspected they would” and “we feel great about where we stand from an advertiser-delivery perspective.”

Photo: Volganet.ru/Wikimedia Commons.