The February numbers of ComScore came out late last week and I was very curious as to the impact the Olympics had on the CTV Network. The results are incredible. According to ComScore, 6.951M Canadians logged onto CTVOlympics.ca in the month of February generated a whopping 28M visits for the month and 658M page views. The number of US citizens who logged onto CTVOlympics.ca was equally impressive coming in at 1.423M. The Olympics helped push the CTV network into the #8 spot for most visited Canadian online property and breaking 11M users network wide for the month.
Back in 2005 when CTV won the bid (see article), the alliance lead by Bell GlobeMedia between CTV and Rogers paid $153M for the rights to broadcast.
Playing with some pure online math, this would mean that CTV paid $22 per unique online user or $5.46 per visit or $0.23 cents per page view. Which means to break even, from a pure online perspective CTV would needed to have monetized at $232 CPM.
Of course you can’t look at this from a pure online perspective, this was for the entire broadcast rights, including television which all accounts show did extremely well for CTV. Did CTV monetize this traffic well, I am not sure, but the raw traffic numbers are impressive.
Will WorldCup of Soccer have the same impact? We will see later this year.