Olympic video ad spending “passable”
Spending on online video ads on the NBC Olympics website reached $5.75 million (£3.12 million) in total, according to new figures.
Compiled by eMarketer, the statistics showed that video ad expenditure for the event in the US was equivalent to just 1.1 per cent of the $505 million predicted to be spent on the medium overall this year.
The organisation said that the figure was "passable" considering the relatively short duration of the Games and pointed to NBC website visitors being forced to download Microsoft’s Silverlight player to access video content as one possible reason for the fact that most of the site’s traffic was not made up of video viewers.
However, eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman said that the Olympics showed there is potential in the video ad market.
"As a signifier for future online events, the games set a high bar for the competition - establishing that major sports events, tournaments and professional leagues ought to offer an abundance of video content online, not just snippets," he remarked.
According to comScore, the official Beijing Olympics website saw 16.5 million unique visitors between August 8th and 17th.
