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≡ INTEL REPORT ≡
“These Olympic Games Paris 2024 met the expectations of the world. These were truly Olympic Games of a new era.”
That’s from International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach (GER) at a Thursday news conference at the end of the three-day Executive Board meeting in Lausanne, with the IOC releasing a 19-page report on the audience for the Paris Games.
The headline was that, according to survey data collected by Publicis Sports & Entertainment from 18 countries and 10,775 respondents aged 13-65, 84% “followed the Olympic Games Paris 2024.”
Extended to cover the entire planet at the same rate, that results in a total of five billion people following the Games worldwide.
The report is quite coy and rather spare, promoting the 84% following and the five billion total, but provides no details, such as the numerical size of the television audience vs. that on digital or other means of “following” the Games. There was some added data and estimates:
● Television rights-holders presented 28.7 billion viewer hours of the Games, a 25% increase over Tokyo 2020 (23.0 billion).
● An impressive 70% of rights-holder viewers followed the Games on both television and digital media, with only 18% watching only on television and 12% following only on digital. That’s an increase from Tokyo 2020, where 64% used both and 27% were on television only.
● An estimated 270 million posts were made to the major social-media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube – resulting in an estimate of 412 billion digital “engagements.”
The coverage presented by rights-holders increased significantly. Combined program hours on television reached 178,002, up 18% from Tokyo 2020. Digital coverage presented soared to 308,741 hours combined among all rights-holders.
In France, the Games were wildly received, with 95% of the potential audience watching an average of 24 hours of coverage across the 17 days of the Olympics.
A post-Games survey by Publicis in 15 countries, with 9.375 respondents, showed that 73% considered the Games to be an organizational and aesthetic success, up from a Rio 2016 poll of 57% and a Tokyo 2020 report of 65%.
Interest and appreciation for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games was, no doubt, enormous. The IOC’s limited sharing of the data, however, limits any conclusions on trends for the future, other than that streaming continues to reduce the television-only audience, as is true for most programming.
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It’s interesting to note than FIFA distributed its delayed audience report on the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar on 29 November, also claiming five billion people engaged with the tournament across television, digital medial, social media or just reading about it in a newspaper.
However, FIFA did detail the audience segments, with 2.9 billion watching on television, 2.7 billion watching on digital streaming platforms, and 2.2 billion engaging on social media, with many people following on all three.
FIFA’s research, also done by Publicis, was based on surveys in 24 countries with a 26,000 sample size.
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