Beijing 2008 over: Yahoo!7 release audience data

Yahoo!7 today released some figures on the popularity of their Olympics presence this year.

The topline ...

- 1.2m unique users for Week 1. 1.15m unique users for Week 2
- 32m pageviews
- 4m video streams

What we don't know ...

- engagement stats (time spent, repeat visits)
- most popular time of day
- how many of the users were AU based (you'd estimate around 80%)

Yahoo! would be happy with these numbers. And they'd be happy with the way they utilised the TV coverage to push to web - which they did very well.

For next time (well, next big event as 9 has the next Olympics) they would probably want to add search capabilities to the online video, as this is the only area I think may have fallen short.

4m streams isn't bad, don't get me wrong. But on a site that was claiming around or above 300k users every day it's not great. 4m streams over the 16 days of the games equals 250,000 streams a day. Personally, I think these numbers would have been greater with a search function as finding some videos was very difficult. Also remember, they had some very strong content (all the good content) which would have been in demand from users - if they could find it easily. I also think they could have integrated video search for Olympic content into their own search engine - if you searched for Usain Bolt the day after the 100m there was no reference to watching the video on Yahoo!

However, the AU streams hold up well when compared with the stream data for the NBC Olympics site in the US (which had a load more content).

The US NBC site had around 75m streams (I am basing this number on 56m streams after day 12, extrapolating the number out to 16 days - http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2008/tc20080820_627259.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_digital+entertainment)

The US has 223.1m Internet users ... which works out at .29 video streams per total ppl online (US).

AU has 11.65m Internet users ... which works out at .34 video streams per total ppl online (AU)

If you apply a $60cpm to the 4m streams and assume a 90% sell through, if the Olympics were sold on normal CPM (which they weren't) it would have meant a $216,000 pay day for Yahoo!7 - which still means online video is small potatoes when compared to its broadcast cousin.

Still, Yahoo!7 held their own during the Beijing Olympics and no doubt surprised many on how well they delivered. Now we wait to see just how much incremental traffic the Olympics delivered for them, and whether they can hold onto them and push them across the network into their key areas of News, Mail, Search, Answers and Entertainment.