Neilsen Media Research – a fine media research company who I have contracts with via my employer – has released details of a story suggesting that 4.7bn people watched at least some of the Olympic coverage last month. That’s out of a rough estimate of 6.6bn for the planet’s population.
I’m always deeply suspicious of stories like that unless you have some really strong material to back it up.
As ever, there’s no obvious detail on their website.
Let’s try to break down the data a little. In China, the most populous nation on earth, we’re told that 94% of their 1.4bn people watched at least some. That’s high, but not unfeasible since these Olympics were in China, and the state TV company pretty much carried nothing but Olympics for the duration. If you watched TV in China, then you watched the Olympics. Perhaps that missing 6% don’t actually own or even have access to a TV?
The next most populous country in the world is India with around 1.1bn living there. But the Olympics are not popular in that country, and it seems unlikely that even with India achieving its first ever individual gold, that the Olympics will have had strong viewing figures.
The next biggest countries are the US, which had strong viewership, and Indonesia.
Viewing was said to be strong in South Korea and Mexico. But how many of Pakistan’s 165m or Bangladesh’s 147m were watching?
The population of the entire African continent is just under 1bn. What proportion were watching the Olympics?
I’m always suspicious when global audiences are guestimated – 1bn for a domestic football cup, 1bn for a sport not widely played outside North America, etc. So I’d just like to see some detail to determine how these figures were derived. Apparently 37 markets were used. But which 37, and more importantly, which countries with large populations were excluded?