NBC Gets Bronze, Google Doesn’t Medal In Olympics Coverage
By Anna Johnson on August 25th, 2008NBC only got fool’s gold (I’ll call it bronze) in its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and Google failed to medal, according to Erik Qualman.
Writing in Search Engine Watch, Mr Qualman makes the point that NBC was, among other things, fooling itself by keeping prime Olympics events (such as the swimming and gymnastics) for its television audience and not showing them live on the web.
NBC presumably did so to preserve the popularity of its television broadcast since that’s what is supported by big-spending, brand advertisers. But advertisers really want to be where their prospects are. And Mr Qualman explains that it’s self-deceptive to rely on a traditional, “antiquated” indicator of where people are and what they’re doing, such as Nielsen ratings.
Meanwhile, by being unable or slow to deliver relevant search results when little-known athletes scored medals, Google failed to medal at all during the Olympics. Evidently, Microsoft and Yahoo attempted to ensure more relevant results by rolling up their sleeves and manually tweaking their search engines… something that Google did too, but only during the latter stages of the Games.
All in all, a less than ideal coverage of the Olympics by NBC and Google, given the possibilities offered by the web. Let’s see if the broadcasters and search engines medal at the London Olympics in 2012…
