Winter Games
push NBC to third place
Seven nights boost the network to a 2.8 in 18-49s
By Toni Fitzgerald
Feb 22, 2010
After a strong week of Olympics coverage, NBC has leapfrogged ABC into third place for the season among adults 18-49.
Seven nights of Olympic competition have pushed the network to a 2.8 season-to-date rating among 18-49s, according to Nielsen data, 0.1 ahead of ABC.
Thursday night the Games averaged a 7.0 in adults 18-49, the fifth time in six nights that the Olympics topped a 7.0 rating.
The only other show that had topped a 7.0 rating for NBC this season was "Sunday Night Football."
The network is hoping that the huge Olympic tune-in will give it a post-Games boost as well. It has been airing promos for new shows "The Marriage Ref" and "Parenthood" this week and will premiere the programs shortly after the Olympics finish.
NBC is also airing a tongue-in-cheek promo featuring Jay Leno to hype his move back to "The Tonight Show" on March 1. The ad plays on promos the network ran last summer to publicize Leno's move to 10 p.m.
Meanwhile, the Games continue to pace well ahead of the 2006 Turin Olympics, as well as the '98 Nagano Games. Through Saturday night, NBC was averaging 26.3 million total viewers, the most for any non-U.S. Winter Games since the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.
Vancouver is up 28 percent over the first nine nights in Turin, which averaged 20.6 million.
The Games continue to wallop shows that outrated them four years ago, too. On Thursday, with Evan Lysacek winning the first men's figure skating gold for the U.S. since 1988, NBC more than doubled viewership for CBS's competing "Survivor" and ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," both of which topped the Games four years ago.
Through the nine days of competition, 162 million Americans have tuned in to some portion of the Olympics across the five NBC Universal channels carrying the Games, including USA, MSNBC, CNBC and Universal HD.
That's more than half of all Americans, and it's 5 million more than the 2006 Games to this point.
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