GigaOM » Olympics

Don’t like television? Then you’re not going to like the future of Twitter very much

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:37:04 +0000

According to a number of anonymous reports, Twitter is in the process of buying Bluefin Labs, an analytics company that specializes in broadcast media — an acquisition that would be its largest ever. Although the news hasn’t been confirmed by either party, a Bluefin deal fits the trajectory that Twitter has been on for some time now: namely, a focus on television as a key partner for the real-time information network. But will this choice divert Twitter from a much larger opportunity and/or drive away users? (Update: Twitter has confirmed the acquisition)

As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?
—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz
—
(@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness
—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Twitter’s relationship with the media: It’s complicated

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:41:48 +0000

Although it has only been a mainstream social network for a few short years, Twitter has formed a surprisingly tight and symbiotic relationship with the media, both because it is a kind of real-time newswire for information about events like the Arab Spring and the upcoming U.S. election, and also because it gives journalists an easy way to extend their personal brands into the social web. The company’s moves to lock down its network and control more of the content have raised some hackles in the journalism community, however, even as Twitter expands on its partnerships with select media entities such as NBC and MTV — and those stress points are only going to increase as the company’s ambitions and desire for revenue continue to grow.

A recent blog post from the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas does a pretty good job of summarizing why some journalists and media executives might be uneasy about their relationship with Twitter and how they have come to rely on the network. Among other things, the post mentions the restrictions that the company recently announced on its API, which primarily affect third-party developers and apps — but could also wind up penalizing newspapers and other media outlets that have built their own features or services around Twitter using the same API. As the Knight Center post describes it:

“Recent changes to Twitter’s application programming interface (API) rattled some critics concerned about how journalists will use the popular social media platform to cover news in the future [and] beyond the recent API announcement, Twitter has seen a progression of censorship as the company matures that may threaten its credibility as a news source.”

Will media be treated the same as third-party apps?

One of the things that Twitter’s new API restrictions specifically prohibit (without special permission from the company) is mixing tweets from its network with content from other social networks or sources. But as University of British Columbia journalism professor and former BBC staffer Alfred Hermida notes in a recent post about the changes, these rules could also hit newspapers and other outlets that either generate their own curated feeds of content from Twitter and other sources, as the New York Times has done for the Republican National Convention and other events, or use tools such as ScribbleLive and Storify to do so.

So far, Twitter has said that Storify is safe from any repercussions due to the changes — despite the fact that the service (which was founded by former foreign correspondent Burt Herman) appears to be offering features that are frowned on by Twitter, according to the company’s somewhat confusing chart of good vs. bad apps. But given the way that the network has changed its modus operandi recently, by closing off external services such as Tumblr and Instagram and removing referrer links, it’s difficult to know how long that stay of execution might last for something like Storify. If a newspaper or media outlet has made that a key part of their journalistic process, they could be in for a rude awakening.

In a sense, media companies are suffering the same kind of angst that many developers and startups are feeling as Twitter evolves from being an open real-time information utility into a media entity driven by the need for advertising revenue to justify its market valuation. Just as those third-party services have built businesses on top of Twitter’s API because it was free, newspapers and other media outlets have come to rely on the network for the same reason — and could wind up regretting it in much the same way.

Twitter seems happy to have relationships with certain specific media entities, but for the most part they are television networks like NBC — which the company worked closely with during the recent Summer Olympics — and MTV, which is going to be making use of Twitter in a number of ways during its big Video Music Awards event later this month. Although many users seemed irritated by NBC’s delaying tactics during the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media team, Chloe Sladden, told the New York Times that the network viewed the partnership as a huge success because it acted as “an amazing daytime teaser trailer driving people into prime time.”

Twitter wants to partner with some, compete with others

If you are a prominent media player such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, you can also get access to the “expanded tweets” or “Twitter cards” feature that the information network recently launched, which is the basis for much of its planned expansion. That allows more of your content to be shown inside a frame on the company’s website or inside its mobile apps — but as we’ve explained, this seems to be almost as much of a competitive move by Twitter as it does a helpful one for media companies, since Twitter is the one who gets the benefit of that content.

Meanwhile, as the Knight Center post noted, some media outlets are concerned about where Twitter’s desire to partner with TV networks and brands like NBC and MTV might take it, since the company was criticized fairly heavily for suspending the account of a British journalist who took potshots at its corporate partner during the Olympics. A Twitter spokesman said this was a misunderstanding related to the journalist’s posting of an NBC executive’s email address, but for many the incident was a critical breach of trust — and a sign that Twitter can and will control or even censor the content on its network as it sees fit.

And so, media outlets are left with a dilemma: Twitter is hugely useful in a whole variety of ways, and it has become a crucial part of much political and social news coverage. But at the same time, relying on a proprietary and increasingly competitive service for a key part of your business can be unwise, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, and sooner or later media companies are going to have to confront that reality and figure out how to deal with it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mathias and Abysim

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Two moves that tell you everything you need to know about Twitter’s future

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 23:38:21 +0000

We’ve been writing a lot lately about the transformation that Twitter is going through — one that has seen it shift from being a kind of real-time information utility to being a global media entity, and how that has led the company to restrict access to its API, in order to control as much of the content flowing through its network as possible. But nothing sums this transition, and the picture it paints of Twitter’s future, better than two recent events: In the first, the company abruptly yanked Tumblr’s ability to connect to Twitter’s friend-finder API, and in the second it bragged about how positive its recent partnership with NBC was around the Summer Olympics. Welcome to the new Twitter world order.

The Tumblr news didn’t come as that much of a surprise to anyone that has been following recent events, since Twitter has already cut off other apps such as Instagram. In fact, Matt Buchanan at Buzzfeed wrote a post on Wednesday about how the blog network could be the next target for Twitter and within a matter of hours Tumblr lost the ability to connect to Twitter.

In the case of Instagram, Twitter’s removal of those connection rights — which allowed users to find and connect with any Twitter followers who also use the photo-sharing app — seemed as though it might have been driven in part by a desire to play hardball with Instagram’s new owner, Facebook. But Tumblr isn’t owned by a competitor: If anything, the blog network has been a close partner of Twitter’s, up to and including building in support for the newly introduced “Twitter cards” that show expanded information about tweets.

Twitter cut Tumblr off even though it is a partner

Despite those ties, Twitter decided to shut off Tumblr’s ability to show users their Twitter friends, a decision that even one Twitter engineer apparently doesn’t agree with. And Tumblr was clearly disappointed by the move, saying in a statement delivered to a number of blogs:

“To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability to “Find Twitter Friends” on Tumblr. Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting. Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter’s first partners… We are truly disappointed by Twitter’s decision.”

The key to the move, and to the similar action taken against Instagram, is contained in the only comment that Twitter has so far made publicly about either decision — after cutting off access to the friend-finder ability on Instagram, the company said simply that: “We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram.” Twitter pointed to this statement after the Tumblr decision as well, saying it had nothing to add.

As designer and developer Dustin Curtis of Svbtle described in a post about Twitter’s recent behavior, a huge amount of Twitter’s value to both users and external services is tied up in its follower graph — that is, the index of all a user’s friends and connections, which in turn are a direct representation of their interests. That “interest graph” is what gives Twitter any power it might have to target advertising, to customize search results, to promote tweets, and all the other things it is trying to do in order to monetize its platform and justify its market value.

Unlike Facebook, where users are normally connected with their friends via other means, that interest graph represents all the power that Twitter has over a user. So it’s not surprising the company would want to control that feature as closely as possible, and even turn it into a monetization strategy (it’s not clear whether Twitter asked Tumblr to pay for access or whether it was just removed). The only question now is whether apps like Flipboard — which also had close ties to Twitter, until CEO Mike McCue left the board of directors — will suffer the same fate.

The future is driving eyeballs to television programs

As it cuts off the third-party developers (and in some cases users) who helped generate much of its success, signs of where Twitter is headed are also abundant: They can be seen in the deals that the company has signed with corporate partners such as NBC, which led to an official Twitter hub where curated information about the Olympics appeared — and also caused a significant amount of controversy when the company suspended the account of a journalist who was critical of NBC. In a comment about the partnership, Twitter’s VP for media, Chloe Sladden, said:

“It’s not fair to describe Twitter as a spoiler mechanism. What we saw is that it was an amazing daytime teaser trailer driving people into prime time.”

In other words, despite the critical protests of users who popularized the hashtag #NBCfail — because of the TV network’s decision to post tweets about events that weren’t going to be broadcast in the U.S. for hours — and despite the fact that the NBC deal forced Twitter to geo-block anyone outside the U.S. from seeing anything on its official hub, the company was more than happy with the relationship because it drove lots of people to watch television. As media relationships become a bigger part of Twitter’s future, which they will almost certainly do, that kind of argument is going to define the company’s vision of success.

The only question that remains is whether enough users want Twitter to become that kind of media entity, with all the controls and restrictions and advertising messages that come with it. It’s possible that — as some have argued — the third-party developers who are complaining about their treatment by the company are no longer relevant, and that those users who have been supporting alternatives like App.net are simply misguided. Or Twitter may have miscalculated badly, and sealed its fate as yet another media entity scrambling to promote its ads to a declining user base, just as MySpace did.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

By the numbers: How the Olympics helped to take multi-screen mainstream

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:55:08 +0000

Comcast released an astonishing piece of data this week: The average Xfinity customer who viewed live streams of the the games online authenticated 2.4 devices. It’s worth noting that this is in addition to millions of TV screens used to watch the London games; those 2.4 devices are just mobile phones, tablets and PCs. In other words: Millions of people used not one or two, but three to four screens to watch the Olympics!

That truly makes the 2012 London games the first multi-screen Olympics. It’s also the first time the sporting event has been massively embraced by mobile device users. Sure, the vast majority of viewing still happens on the TV, and for streaming, the PC still reigns supreme. 68 percent of Olympics streams were viewed on PCs, according to Comcast, but that also means that 32 percent were streamed to mobile devices.

Those Comcast numbers are echoed by results from other companies:

NBC said earlier this week that 37 percent of its live streams were watched in the company’s iOS or Android apps.
A third of the BBC’s Olympic web coverage views came from mobile phones.
60 percent of all visits to the official website of the Olympic games (including access through mobile apps) came from mobile devices.
485 million viewers followed the Olympic coverage of Chinese state broadcaster CNTV via PCs, mobile and connected devices.
And some of the smaller players in the space profited from the move to mobile devices as well: Second screen app maker ConnecTV told us that the company’s user base grew by 87.5 percent as the result of the games. ConnecTV, whose app had former gold medal winners provide live commentary while the games unfolded on TV, also saw a 93.8% increase in chat messages and a 99% increase in unique logins during the games.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) (s CC-BY-SA) Flickr user davehighbury.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Exclusive: China’s online Olympics audience breaks records

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:05:31 +0000

The U.S. Olympic athletes may have won the most gold medals in London, but China is once again clocking the biggest online audience worldwide for an event like this one. 485 million users followed CNTV’s coverage of the games via PCs, mobile and connected devices, according to data the broadcaster shared exclusively with GigaOm.

Even more impressive: CNTV served a total of 610 million streams to mobile phones, tablets and connected devices alone. China’s online video viewing has traditionally been dominated by PC usage, and Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes are still a rare sight. However, smart phone and tablet ownership is growing quickly. CNTV addressed this new audience with a dedicated premium offering for the 2012 Olympics that was facilitated by U.S. streaming platform provider Neulion.

Some other key metrics provided by CNTV include: CNTV’s website registered 580 million page views and around 35 million unique viewers per day on average during the games. Page views were about 255 percent higher than daily averages before the games, and uniques were up 134 percent. At peak, CNTV clocked 880 million daily page views, and 40 million uniques, which I’ve been told is a historical record for the broadcaster.

How do these numbers compare? NBC saw 159 million video streams during the Olympics across all devices, and NBCOlympics.com clocked close to two billion page views for the entirety of the event, according to NBC. The BBC’s website saw 106 million total video views and 12 million mobile video views throughout the games.

CNTV’s Neulion partnership wasn’t the only way to view video of the games within China. The broadcaster also streamed video on its own site as well as through its CBOX P2P client, set-top boxes and connected devices. It also piped video to Sina, Sohu, Tencent and Netease in an effort that’s been called “one cloud, multiple screens.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Official Olympics numbers: online engagement was mostly mobile

Robert Andrews — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:30:09 +0000

Now that the Olympic Games is over, Alex Balfour, the Cricinfo co-founder who has spent the last six years as head of London 2012 new media, has compiled these slideshow stats summarising engagement through with the local organising committee’s 77 digital products.

We have already reported strong mobile figures from the BBC (a third of web visits, a tenth of video streams) and NBC (16 percent of web users, 45 percent of video requests).

But Balfour’s stats show even higher mobile engagement - 60 percent of visits to the official London2012.com site and apps came from mobile devices.

That ratio is so high partly because the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) had several apps in circulation! As well as the London2012.com websites. But mobile web in isolation took over half of weekend web traffic.

In all, the London2012.com site clocked about three times more users than the BBC Sport effort.

Read on for more official end-of-games data on how London 2012 fared with social media, location-based engagement, email marketing and more…

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

BBC’s ‘multi-platform Games’ reveals new appetite for live video, mobile browsing

Robert Andrews — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:41:01 +0000

While NBC is still taking a social media pummelling for “failing” with what it hails as a record-breaking Olympics audience, the BBC, whose Olympics undertaking has been lauded, is telling the world about its new online records.

On the busiest individual days of London 2012, BBC.co.uk served even more traffic than during the whole of the 2012 soccer World Cup, BBC Olympics product head Cait O’Riordan writes (release). That number is 2.8 percent petabytes.

We previewed the BBC’s Olympics online strategy here, here and here. Beside near-day-long coverage across five of its nine linear TV channels, the corporation had cast up to 2,500 hours of live action (every minute of every event) on its website for desktop, smartphone and tablet and through up to 24 simultaneous live streams available online, through internet TVs and via satellite and cable TV.

An average 9.5 million global daily uniques to the BBC Sport website is almost a quarter higher than the previous record level.
Video requests were doubled from those seen during any previous event (106 million) – higher than the 2008 games (32 milion) and 2010 World Cup (38 million).
A third of web visits came from mobile. But only a tenth of video requests were mobile.
Most interestingly, the majority of video requests (62 million) were for live streams. Only eight million were for on-demand live streams, 35 million were for short-form clips.
The BBC, which adapts streaming quality to viewers’ bandwidth, says the average bitrate was “the highest the BBC has ever delivered online” at 1Mbps.

O’Riordan:

“Offering everything isn’t enough in the age of multiple devices: our further ambition was to ensure audiences could access our coverage wherever they were, and whenever they wanted it.

“This has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.”

Hourly viewership by platform shows how most usage came from office computers at lunchtime. The newest phenomenon, albeit in line with previously-issued BBC data, is that, despite being a relatively new form factor, tablets accounted for more viewing than any other online medium late at night, as people swiped their iPads whilst watching TV from their sofas and whilst heading to bed.

Mobile and tablet traffic also peaked at weekends. (40 percent of browsers compared with 30 percent on weekdays).

The BBC recently introduced a new web video player for Wimbledon, F1 2012 and the Olympic Games, melding live with catch-up sports. New stats show in-stream chapter markers, allowing live viewers to rewind to key events, were clicked 1.5 million times each day.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Olympic winners: How NBC’s authentication helped VPN providers

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:03:22 +0000

NBC is streaming some 3,500 hours of video live from the London Olympics – but access to the live streams is restricted to pay TV subscribers who have access to MSNBC and CNBC as part of their TV bundle.

That leaves out quite a few viewers. Cord cutters, for example, but also subscribers to low-cost satellite bundles have to follow the games on TV, where coverage is limited and tape-delayed.

Or they have to look elsewhere — and a number of more tech-savvy viewers are turning to VPN providers to access live streams from the BBC or other foreign media organizations. One provider told us that installs of his software tripled since the games started.

From security to free TV

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been around for a long time. The corporate world uses this technology to offer remote workers secure access to PCs in their office. Security-conscious web workers have been paying for VPN services to encrypt the traffic they’re sending over public Wi-Fi hotspots. And an increasing number of TV fans have been using VPNs to access foreign streaming services.

The technology behind these different use cases is fundamentally the same: A user connects to a remote server, which then forwards the traffic to other servers. One benefit can be that the connection between the user and the remote VPN server is encrypted. Another is that to other servers, it looks like the user is accessing them from a different IP address.

That second part is what a number of VPN providers have been cashing in on. Video services like Hulu or Netflix regularly block all traffic from countries they’re not officially launched in yet. Users can circumvent this by accessing a VPN provider that offers them an IP number from the same country as the service they’re trying to access.

Suddenly, we all want to be British

The BBC blocks access to its Olympics live streams to anyone who doesn’t have a U.K. IP address.

Usually, this means that users in other countries access VPNs to pretend that they live in the U.S. Hulu is especially popular with foreign VPN users, and some have even figured out how to pay for Netflix with a U.S. credit card and then access it from abroad. But during the London games, this trend was suddenly reversed — and everyone wanted to be British.

Case in point: VPN provider AnchorFree, which targets foreign Hulu fans with a special offering called Expat Shield, usually serves 93 percent of its software downloads to users outside of the U.S. However, during the Olympics, 46 percent of all new users came from the States.

But Americans weren’t the only ones looking for access to the BBC’s streaming offering. Business was up across the board for Expat Shield during the games. A company spokesperson told us that the service usually registers around 3,400 new users per day. During the games, that number went up to almost 10,700.

VPNs are here to stay

Of course, those are small numbers, which might explain why NBC doesn’t care about the money VPN providers are making with the circumvention of its pay TV authentication wall. (AnchorFree’s offering is ad-supported, but many other companies are charging between $5 and $15 for access to their servers.) Even if tens of thousands of viewers were paying for VPN services, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions NBC makes with retrans fees they’re charging cable providers.

The same is true for foreign rights, which is why territorial restrictions for services like Hulu and Netflix aren’t going to go away anytime soon. Of course, that also means that people who are tech-savvy enough are going to use VPNs to access foreign video providers. And the Olympics likely helped to introduce a whole bunch of new users to this idea.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user mark sebastian.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Forget ‘social media Olympics’, these are the mobile games

Robert Andrews — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:20:32 +0000

Over the last week, we have reported how almost half of U.S. and UK Olympics video streams served by NBC and the BBC were to smartphones and tablets. Now search data further reinforce how the mobile internet has reached new heights this summer.

Google on Tuesday published data showing the largest share of searches for “Paul McCartney”, as his performance closed out London 2012′s opening ceremony, came from smartphones…

Strung out over the games’ first two whole days, Google’s data shows desktop regaining the majority of search share for Olympics-related queries; only Japan saw the majority of searches from handsets…

Evidently, mobiles and tablets pull the strongest audiences at night and around large events. Dai Pham and Adam Grunewald of Google’s mobile ads marketing team write:

“We see these trends in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, Oscars, and Eurovision). But the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one we can see happening at a global level.”

Ahead of the games, three quarters of IAB and Mojiva survey respondents (U.S. and UK) said they would follow their country’s Olympic team via mobile in some way. Half said they would do so whilst watching TV.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Are the Olympics a bigger media draw than the Super Bowl?

Daniel Frankel — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 21:58:12 +0000

Are the Games really bigger than the Big Game?

According to a Pew Research study released Monday, nearly 8 out of 10 Americans say they’re following the London Olympics on either traditional television or via the internet.

As a media event, that makes the Summer Olympics bigger than the Super Bowl, which draw attention from about 7 out of 10 Americans. (The latter data came from a Harris Poll conducted last year.)

Not surprisingly, traditional television is the dominant consumption platform for the London Games, with 73 percent of the 1,005 individuals surveyed by Pew saying they watch events on the tube (see chart).

Also read: BBC’s super-served Olympics shows how narrowcast can go wide

However, among younger demographics, usage of internet platforms to follow the Olympics is significant.

For example, among groups aged 18-29 and 30-49, 22 percent are tracking the Games online. And 31 percent of 18-29-year-olds are using social media to get their Olympics fix, far away the most social-media use of any demo surveyed.

Also notable: The level of Olympics consumption rises along with wealth and education.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Social-TV apps and consumer behavior