Posted By
Steve Heikkila on 02/18/2010
Question:
What does the International Olympic Committee have in common with the governments
of China and Iran?
Answer: Twitter and other social media are threatening its ability to control its media monopoly.
You know how it goes. You go to all of that effort to tame your media channels so that they don’t run at counter purposes to the imperatives of the regime or, as the case may be, your carefully crafted commercial interests, and suddenly some infernal Web innovation comes along that turns the Internet into some kind of monopoly-thwarting democratizing force. Next thing you know, you find yourself in the embarrassing situation of having to explain to NBC, who just paid you $820 Million for exclusive Winter Olympics broadcasting rights, that some iPhone wielding tourist from Copenhagen is providing real-time men’s speed skating updates to the entire world—for free!
This is the scenario the IOC faces during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, in which, as one of my colleagues has already noted, is being touted as the first “Twitter Olympics.” To address the issue, the IOC has created a set of blogging guidelines designed to place strong restrictions on how Olympic athletes are able to disseminate information online during the Olympic Games. As a recent Wired Magazine article reported, confusion regarding these new social media rules is causing some athletes to abstain from all forms of social media posting until the Olympic Games are over. In short, then, since the IOC cannot control social media, it has opted to attempt to censor its users. This is, of course, a strategy that is doomed to fail.
In all fairness to the IOC, conducting the Olympic Games is a wildly expensive endeavor, and the Vancouver Olympics are no exception. According to the Vancouver Sun, costs will likely run into several billions of dollars. By way of perspective, that price exceeds the Gross National Product of Greenland and over 40 other countries. And while Canadian taxpayers will foot the bill for a portion of these costs, the vast majority of funding will come from corporate sponsorship and fees generated from auctioning off exclusive broadcasting rights. In short, this is a business model built upon exclusivity, and exclusivity is precisely what online social media threatens to undermine—particularly where broadcasting rights are concerned. Why should a television network pay big bucks for exclusive Olympic coverage if this exclusivity cannot be delivered?
It’s no wonder, then, that the IOC wants to keep Olympic athletes—many of whom are athletic professionals sponsored by brands that have not paid for Official Olympic Sponsorship status—from “broadcasting” Olympic news on Twitter and Facebook. However, the athletes are not the only potential media competition at the Vancouver Olympics. There are also the tens of thousands of spectators, many of whom carry Web-enabled mobile devices. How will the IOC control them?
The “Twitter Olympics” may well be indicative of a new front in the ongoing market-share war between online and traditional media. In the end, the IOC’s ability to command a price approaching a billion dollars for exclusive Olympic broadcasting rights from a television network like NBC is contingent upon that network’s ability to convert the investment into advertising revenue. And advertising revenue is primarily an audience numbers game. We’ve already seen what has happened to network television viewership with the proliferation of cable television content. The audience market share enjoyed by what would currently be considered a hit television show would have constituted grounds for cancellation twenty years ago. The ability of online media to make similar inroads remains to be seen, but its ability to undermine media monopolization strategies certainly looks like a bold step in that direction. Viva la Revolution.
White Horse is at the forefront of the social media revolution. Check out our emerging media practice.
Tags: Social networks, Web communities, blogs
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