Stunning performances by Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky and Noah Lyles have led to gold medals — and strong TV ratings — as the 2024 Paris Olympics enters its final week.
NBCUniversal enters the final week of the 2024 Paris Olympics on a Simone Biles-like run.
Helped by strong Team USA performances from gold medalists such as Biles, swimmer Katie Ledecky and sprinter Noah Lyles, NBC said that viewership for the 2024 Games averaged approximately 33.8 million viewers across TV and streaming platforms through the first five days, a 79 percent increase from the 2021 Tokyo Games, based on data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.
That jump is good news for the NBCUniversal, which in 2014 paid $7.65 billion for the U.S. media rights for the Olympic Games through 2032. It also is a boost for sponsors, who committed $1.25 billion to advertise at the Paris Games, the reported.
“Clearly, the Olympics are back,” NBCUniversal chairman Mark Lazarus said on a conference call late last week. “It reminds me and those of us who were in London in 2012 of the enthusiasm that the crowds have here and what the excitement is at home.”
The bounce back could have been predicted, although perhaps not to this large of an extent. The Tokyo Games, scheduled for 2020 but postponed to 2021 because of the pandemic, experienced a viewership decline of about 27 percent from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Ratings for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing dipped even lower, down 42 percent from the 2018 Games in South Korea.
Proximity to the U.S. clearly has helped this time. NBC is benefitting from the decision to air live events during the day in the U.S., something that was not practical because of the time differences in Tokyo, Beijing and South Korea. Paris is only six hours ahead of the Eastern time zone.
