TV Ratings: Olympic Coverage Hits Low on Final Friday
With only one night of competition to go, overnights dip by 28 percent.
With the Winter Olympics now almost over, the final Friday in Pyeongchang brought a nightly low for NBC's coverage.
Primetime averaged a 9.2 overnight rating among metered market households, with NBC and NBC Sports Network coverage factored in. It's a steep 28 percent drop from the night before, though that was to be somewhat expected, given Thursday's draw of the women's figure-skating finale. (Coverage dipped even more from the previous Friday.)
The U.S. men's team gold-medal win in curling fetched a 1.0 rating on NBC Sports Network during the very late window, trailing only the U.S. women's hockey team's victory two nights earlier as a network best in the early a.m.
As of Friday afternoon, the average stood at 20.6 million nightly viewers on both networks and streaming, off 8 percent from the last Winter Olympics in 2014. The final night of competition and the closing ceremony stand little chance of altering that number by much at this point.
Still, the drops have not been as big as many expected. And even though the 2018 Winter Games will rank as the lowest-rated, they're being chalked up as a win for NBC.
Saturday night brings the looser figure-skating exhibition gala and the four-man bobsled competition.
