The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro have stumbled short of the ratings finish line for NBC, with numbers falling short of the 2012 London Olympics, even counting the people who watched digitally or via cable.
"The average audience of 28.6 million after five days is down nearly 20 percent from the 35.6 million who were watching the London Games," The New York Times reported. "And viewership among people ages 18 to 34 has fallen 32 percent."
Numbers indicated that more people streamed the games than ever before.
"Through Wednesday (Aug. 10), users had streamed more than a billion minutes of live coverage from Rio, a 232 percent increase over the same period in London," TV By the Numbers reported. "It’s also already passed the amount of streaming for the full competition in London (818 million minutes)."
Bloomberg blamed those darn millennials for what NBC CEO Steve Burke called his "Olympics nightmare."
“Sports is less ingrained in the younger demographic,” BTIG Research analyst Brandon Ross told Bloomberg. “It has been replaced by other things like video games and e-sports and Snapchat feeds.”
Burke went so far in June as to predict that the Olympics would come and go for young people without them even knowing, given the millennial "obsession" with social media.
"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,” Burke said.
But Esquire writer Sammy Nickalls blasted that broad-brush characterization of millennials, pointing instead to Rio's troubled and controversial beginnings.
"The problem couldn't possibly be related to the controversy surrounding Rio's water problem or its corruption issues. It's because of us selfish, entitled millennials," Nickalls wrote. "Guess the the International Olympics Committee shouldn't have banned GIFs, huh?"
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com
Twitter: ChandraMJohnson