The Olympics continues to generate strong viewership by today’s diminished standards, while falling dramatically short of just five years ago.
NBC said Wednesday that Tuesday’s primetime coverage of the Tokyo Summer Olympics averaged 16.2 million viewers across all of its platforms, down 55% — and nearly 20 million viewers — from the comparable night in Rio (36.1M). Compared to the first Tuesday of the most recent Olympics, Pyeongchang in 2018, viewership fell a more modest 28% from 22.6 million.
According to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, NBC alone averaged just shy of 14.0 million — down 58% from 2016 (33.4M).
Tuesday was to feature Simone Biles in the women’s gymnastics team final, but she pulled out early in the competition. Notably, it was on the comparable night in ’16 that Biles and the U.S. team won the gold medal. Katie Ledecky, who also starred on that night in 2016, did compete and win a gold Tuesday night — but failed to medal in another one of her races.
Tokyo now accounts for three of the four smallest primetime Summer Olympics telecasts dating back to 2000, with Tuesday’s coverage ranking fourth. Overall, this year’s Olympics accounts for four of the bottom nine. Keep in mind that is with cable and streaming viewership added to NBC’s traditional primetime coverage.
NBC’s primetime Olympics coverage is now averaging 17.5 million viewers across all platforms, more than ten million shy of the NBC-only average at this point in 2016 (28.6M).
The Olympics is far from the first sporting event to suffer historic lows since the wave of cancellations and postponements that decimated the industry in March of last year, joining a list that includes the least-watched Super Bowl since 2007 and the least-watched NBA Finals and World Series on record.
Even with the sharp declines, the Olympics has generated four of the five largest non-football sports audiences over the past year. Keep in mind the Olympics usually outpaces all non-NFL sporting events in whichever year it takes place.
Beyond primetime, USA and NBCSN combined to average 1.48 million for coverage on Tuesday morning — up 24% from the cable audience for the first Tuesday of the Rio Games (1.20M).
[Nielsen estimates from NBC Sports, Karp/Twitter 7.28]
