NBC’s Olympic ratings won’t win any medals

Ratings for the Winter Olympics have slid downhill yet again — and NBC could face an uphill battle turning a profit on them in the coming years.

As Comcast-owned NBC geared up late Sunday to broadcast closing ceremonies for the Winter Games in PyeongChang, overall ratings were on track to slide 8 percent, to just over 20 million prime-time viewers, from four years ago.

The drop, which came despite highlights that included gold medals for snowboarding legend Shaun White and the US curling team, is particularly bad news for a few reasons.

First, those numbers include views on NBC’s livestreaming site, NBCSN, which wasn’t available for the Sochi games in Russia in 2014. Stripping out that roughly 2 million-viewer boost, PyeongChang ratings are down more than 18 percent from Sochi, which clocked 22 million viewers.

Second, the Sochi games themselves were widely judged a ratings flop for NBC, sorely lagging 2010’s Vancouver Winter Games, which drew 24.4 million viewers.

Perhaps worst of all, ratings among viewers ages 18 to 49 — the most coveted demographic for advertisers — were on track to tumble a whopping 24 percent from Sochi levels. Final numbers are due out Monday.

Despite ugly forecasts, NBC is touting the health of its current advertising revenue. NBC execs expect the final tally to reach $940 million, a record that’s up from about $800 million four years ago.

“Advertisers continue to support the Olympics because they recognize the unparalleled value and reach it provides over 18 days and nights,” said Dan Lovinger, executive vice president of advertising sales for NBC Sports Group.

Nevertheless, NBC has shelled out $7.7 billion to broadcast the Olympics through 2032 — despite the growth of web-based viewing habits that have grown increasingly fragmented and are harder to cash in on than TV broadcasts.

Even scarier, some experts fear millennials simply don’t care about sports on TV like earlier generations have — a trend that many believe has slammed NFL ratings.

“As we’ve seen with the NFL, with primetime television, with the Oscars … virtually anything but the NBA, any form of live TV is in decline,” said BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield.

“Primetime TV is down near double digits. The NFL is down high double digits,” he added. “And the steepest declines [in viewership] are among younger viewers.”

This year, some blamed Team USA’s lackluster performance, especially in figure skating. Others pointed to NHL players getting barred from men’s hockey teams. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at the Pivotal Research Group, said changing locations of the games and time zones could also be socking ratings.

“It’s really hard to compare one Olympics to another. There is no data that allows you to compare them,” Wieser said. “Could you compare like-for-like programs, like figure-skating finals?”

On the positive side, Greenfield noted that even though Olympic viewership is down between 16 and 18 percent, the drops don’t look quite as bad when you break them down into yearly increments.

“I’m not saying it’s good, but it still looks better than the trends in TV,” Greenfield said.