NBC Says Snapchat Is An Olympic Bonanza

NBC already has 32 million reasons to believe its digital strategy for coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics is paying off, according to The Wall Street Journal.

That’s the number of Snapchat users who watched NBC-partnered coverage of the Olympics so far on the platform, according to CMO columnist Benjamin Mullin citing data from parent company Snap Inc.

The network is on pace to demolish viewership of 2016’s Rio Games on Snapchat, which reached 35 million unique viewers over 18 days. NBC says its Olympic content on Snapchat generates revenue in the eight figures and doesn’t eat into television viewership.

But cord-cutting and TV ratings declines are increasingly a reality, so Snapchat at least offers a way to build hype for the Olympics among younger viewers and get them to sample the coverage. Snap says “well over” 90% of the audience watching NBC-partnered content is younger than 35, and NBC says that consumption of the Olympics on all platforms is actually up.

Meanwhile, NBC reports NBC Olympics’ coverage of the PyeongChang Olympics delivered the most dominant Winter Games Tuesday night ever, posting a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) average of 22.6 million viewers, according to live plus same day official national data released today by Nielsen, and digital data from Adobe Analytics. (Nielsen “out of home” viewership will be available this week.)

Tuesday night’s NBC/NBCSN average of 22.3 million viewers dominated the TV competition – more than doubling the combined 10.6 million primetime viewers for ABC, CBS and FOX. The NBC-only 21.0 million viewers in the 8-11 p.m. ET primetime window topped by 98% the other broadcast networks – marking the most dominant Winter Games Tuesday night ever (people meter history, since Sept. 1987).

NBCSN’s live primetime coverage of the PyeongChang Olympics has averaged 2.4 million viewers since the opening Saturday night (Feb. 10) – ranking as the most-watched cable network in primetime over the four-day span from Saturday through last night.

In addition, NBC’s “Primetime Plus” show, which follows local news broadcasts on NBC stations, is averaging a Total Audience Delivery of 9.8 million viewers though Tuesday night – up 32% from the 2014 Sochi Olympics late night show over the comparable time frame (7.4 million viewers).