With the Winter Olympics in full swing, B&C partnered with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 7.7 million smart TVs and devices, to take a look at viewership trends thus far.
As you’d expect, viewership has been spiking during the primetime hours, and in particular on Saturday night during some of the first figure skating and snowboarding events. That evening, 17-year-old Redmond Gerard made history as the youngest person to ever win gold for Team USA during a snowboarding event.
Related: NBC Seeks More Ad Sales With Strong Olympic Ratings
Here’s a heatmap of average viewership of the Games so far — notably, the Northwest plus the general areas around Colorado, Wyoming and Utah seem to be tuning in much more than the rest of the U.S. (the darker the color below, the more people were tuning in, with the baseline normalized by each state’s population).
While there’s a certain amount of mass appeal for the Olympics in general, it’s interesting to see the most popular other shows that viewers of the Games have been checking out in the last week. Ellen DeGeneres’ game show Ellen’s Game of Games (which has nothing to do with the Games taking place in PyeongChang, for the record) takes the lead, followed by a mix of news and morning shows.
What particularly stands out is that the viewers who are tuning into the Olympics on NBC are tending to keep their TVs and devices tuned to NBC — so they’re watching The Tonight Show after the Olympics, and NBC’s a.m. line-up, including Today and Megyn Kelly Today, the following morning.
Will NBC be able to convert a meaningful number of those viewers to long-term fans of NBC programming once the Games wrap up? Stay tuned.
