08 April 2011

the reach of YOG articles from Jan to Sep 2010 totalled 1.3 billion

YOG online coverage totals 1.3b readers, says IOC study@straits times

COVERAGE of last year's Youth Olympic Games in Singapore was read by the equivalent of a fifth of the world's population over nine months, a study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee has found.

Done by media analysis and monitoring firm Fisheye Analytics, which also counts the World Economic Forum as another client, the study found that the reach of YOG articles from January to September last year totalled 1.3 billion.

The research tracked online mentions in sources such as newspaper websites, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. It excluded print news and television broadcasts.

The editorial marketing value, or how much a client would have had to pay to be featured in that article, was measured at US$54.6 million (S$68.8 million).

From Aug 1 to Sept 20, more than half of the coverage came from media outside Singapore - including Yahoo news and major global newspapers' sites.

Lydia Ng, the vice-president of marketing for the Singapore-registered Fisheye, explained how it came up with the figures yesterday.

'In a nutshell, we get all kinds of word traffic figures from commercial providers,' she said. 'From those figures, we derive the number of unique visitors that go to a website.

'Looking also at the page views per visitor, we derive, with our own formula, the probability the viewer would have seen a YOG article on the site.'

The total figure is reached by adding up all the views across all the media monitored, with more value given to well-known media.

Ng highlighted that despite having just a tenth of the articles that cited the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the YOG had an editorial marketing value one-third of the event, in February last year.

But the YOG still lags behind the summer Olympics. Editorial media value figures for the 2008 Beijing Games were not available, but studies have estimated that 4.7 billion viewers worldwide tuned in to the event.

For the 2004 Olympics in Athens, this was 3.9 billion. In contrast, the YOG had an estimated TV audience reach of 247 million.

When told of the research figures, Senior Parliamentary Secretary (Community Development, Youth and Sports) Teo Ser Luck said: 'The YOG has generated good publicity in terms of capturing people's attention.'

He also highlighted some intangible benefits of hosting the YOG, such as a greater interest in sports marketing.

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