Big audience for Phelps historic Olympic win

NBC is basking in serious ratings gold from its Olympics telecasts, saying today that 83-million people watched some part of their prime time Tuesday night, when swimmer Michael Phelps set the record for most Olympic gold medals.

Local NBC affiliate WFLA-Ch. 8 found similar success, with 522,000 people watching during prime time last night, nearly 40 percent of all people watching TV in the Tampa Bay area market.

Since the games started Friday, NBC estimates an average 31-million viewers, nearly 5-million more viewers than the 2004 games in Athens at this point. The network also released ratings for viewership across all its platforms -- broadcast TV, cable TV, online, mobile and video on demand -- estimating 103-million viewers on all platforms on Monday, up from 74-million on Friday.

Locally, WFLA says they have averaged 471,000 viewers locally in NBC's prime time, attracting about 14 percent of the adults who own televisions and 34 percent of all people watching TV at the time in the market. Comparatively, according to WFLA, rivals WTSP-Ch. 10 (CBS) and WTVT-Ch. 13 (Fox) have attracted 4 percent of those watching TV in common prime time; WFTS-Ch. 28 (ABC) drew 3-percent.

Other fun numbers:

WFLA's ratings are 20 percent higher than the Athens games and 50 to 80 percent highest than the winter Olympics in 2006.

NBC says 21-million unique users have visited its NBCOlympics.com web site since Friday.

NBC Universal estimates it has attracted 168-million viewers over all its TV platforms over the first five days.

Wonder what will happen once the super-popular swimming and gymnastics events are done?

Comments

[Sully]

Eric,

How is WFLA going to juggle the Olympic coverage with Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay coverage? Is their responsibility to the local area or are they beholden to the national corporate interests of NBC?

[Robert]

While the ratings will go down, the prime time numbers won't suffer that much, especially with track and field events beginning Friday.

[joe hillman]

how did the olympics due for 'fla saturday night against the bucs, which normally would have been on channel 8?

i'm guessing wfla was none to happy to farm that out to channel 38 (?)