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NBC’s $12 Billion Olympics Bet Stumbles, Thanks to Millennials

  • Rio broadcast ratings down 25 percent among 18 to 49 year olds
  • Sports fans get older while advertisers seek younger viewers
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How Important Are the Olympics to NBC's Bottom Line?

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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.”