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Sorry, Millennials just not that into Olympics or Duck sports

8/20/2016: Here at UO, our students are now more interested in the Urban Farm than big-time Duck sports. Bloomberg has the report on the Olympics here:

Back in June, Steve Burke described what he called his Olympics “nightmare.”

“We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent,” the chief executive officer of NBCUniversal said at a conference. “If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”

He has escaped that with the Rio games this year — but not by much. Prime-time broadcast viewership has been down about 17 percent compared to the London games four years ago. And in the 18-to-49-year-old age group coveted by advertisers, it’s been even worse. That audience has been 25 percent smaller, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

… Because ratings fell short, the network had to give buyers free commercial time to make good on guarantees that a certain number of viewers would switch on television sets. The promise was for ratings equaling an average of about 21 million U.S. households and the reality, as of late last week, was roughly 18.2 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

NBC is “going to have to figure out the economics,” said Ian Schafer, founder of the Deep Focus ad agency. It has two years to do it, before the winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

8/15/2016: UO homepage all about Duck sports crap

Had enough? Bookmark the UO Matters “Crap-Free UO Homepage” here.

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8 Comments

  1. Eugenenative 08/16/2016

    University of Nike.

    Do these folks realize that a solid majority of potential students are not sports fans? And I’m a sports fan.

    It gives the impression that the ONLY thing the UO has going for it is its association with a prominent sporting goods/fashion brand.

  2. BC 08/16/2016

    Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the Olympics are happening, with lots of UO representation. Seems like a good time to make a sports connection on our homepage.

    • Dog 08/16/2016

      yes because donations will now pour in to make a state of the art new classroom building …

      • uomatters Post author | 08/16/2016

        And it will help us recruit the sorts of students who want to go to a football factory party school.

        • Dog 08/17/2016

          Indeed, a definite WIN-WIN

          • BC 08/17/2016

            Yes, by all means…when the UO excels at something on the world stage, we should do everything possible to keep it a secret.

    • honest Uncle Bernie 08/21/2016

      Well, if Berkeley was big in the Olympics, I think they would broadcast it.

      My experience has been that on the whole, UO sports is a (small) net plus for academics.

      I’ve found the athletes to be a cut above average.

      The athletic department has developed a real vision, however much you may like it or not.

      I hear that certain potential donors just don’t see that in the academics here.

      Time to do something about that?

      • Olympics fan 08/22/2016

        The Stanford front page looks pretty much identical to the UO page and prominently features their Olympians. They also have a separate page highlighting their achievements:

        http://www.gostanford.com/news/2016/7/7/athletics-bound-for-rio.aspx

        Incidentally, Stanford did quite a bit better than the UO in medal count, almost exclusively because of strength in women’s athletics (particularly swimming).

        Right or not, it is not fair to say that UO is unusual in highlighting the achievements of their Olympians. It would be pretty weird to do otherwise.

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