Yahoo Takes Gold in Overall Olympics Traffic; NBC a Distant Silver

(MoneyWatch)  The Winter Olympics ended on a note of triumph; but NBC's coverage--not so much. The network better be thinking hard about how to do better during the 2012 London Olympics, the last one the network has the rights to before they go up for bidding again.

But new data from comScore shows that NBC's problems are not limited to TV. In terms of the crucial metric of unique visitors, Yahoo's Olympics site far outstripped NBC's own online coverage, with 32 million visitors to NBC's 18.9 million. In fact, ESPN.com, owned by rival ABC, had about the same number of unique visitors to its Olympic coverage as NBC -- and let's not forget that ABC is keenly interested in bidding for rights to post-2012 Olympics.

That makes NBC's online performance alarming, considering that 190 million Americans tuned into some portion of the Games on TV -- a massive platform for NBC to promote the website that neither Yahoo nor ESPN had. The one saving grace is that since NBC had actual footage of competition -- as opposed to the "color" pieces that Yahoo was pretty much limited to -- its visitors spent more time on the site than on any other Olympic-themed site, at 13.3 minutes.

The huge gap in overall traffic probably had to do with the live vs. taped controversy. A site like Yahoo, with no vested interest in gathering a prime-time audience, could be as transparent as its limited rights to covering the Olympics would allow. That meant it offered the kind of real-time information that NBC tried to avoid. (When I went to NBC's site during daytime coverage of the Games, its promised "live coverage" was usually a text blog. Not very exciting when you know real footage is sitting in a vault at the network somewhere.) If all you wanted to do was to check in on the hockey scores or who is leading in the prelims of figure skating competition, Yahoo was probably a more reliable, agenda-free source.

The implication for London is that NBC has to reverse course: Make all information (including video) real-time, and then monetize the bejesus out of the website. Only then can NBC make competitors like Yahoo the also-rans that they should be.

Previous coverage of NBC's 2010 Olympics coverage at BNET Media:

• NBC Poised to Become Olympics Biggest Loser
• R.I.P. Olympics Business Model, 1960-2010
• Olympics Take the Gold ... in Cluelessness