NBC broadcast highlights from the day of the Paris Olympics to tens of millions of people every night in prime time. Spectators watch the U.S. women’s gymnastics team take gold in a “redemption journey” after taking silver in Tokyo; They are in awe as U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky completes a race, and Her competitors were so far behind her that they weren’t even in the picture.
But the most fascinating and bizarre Olympic coverage happened on TikTok.
Interest in Olympic content was evident before the opening ceremony. For weeks, official Olympic and Paralympic accounts have shared videos on different social media platforms aimed at getting people excited. The Olympics (and other major sporting events in general) thrive on storylines: stories about which teams are long-term rivals, what adversities athletes face, what controversies their sports cause, and so on. Marketing appeal. In addition to these common narratives and storylines, TikTok has become a venue for more alternative or niche subplots, many of which arise organically from individual athletes and fans.
For example: Have you ever heard of chocolate chip waffles in the Olympic Village? The meme apparently started when Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen posted a video rating various items in the cafeteria, giving the gooey chocolate waffle an 11/10 score. He has since made at least 10 videos about Olympic waffles. Now people at the Olympics are looking for waffles everywhere. They are looking for a real waffle brand and begging Costco to import it into the United States. There’s not much depth here other than the pastries looking good and a tech-savvy Olympian coming up with a good trick, but people love it.
The wealth of content about the Olympics isn’t unique to TikTok or the Paris Games. During the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, U.S. women’s rugby player Ilona Maher won fans after sharing behind-the-scenes footage from the event on TikTok. But Maher is an outlier: Her content performs well because it’s novel. Many TikTok users’ feeds are now filled with Olympic content, and not just from big-name Olympic stars like Maher or gymnast Sunitha Lee. We also saw a video of Mongolia’s gorgeous team uniforms being tried on. People are making fan cams of handsome fencers set to K-pop songs. Korean shooter Kim Ye-ji looks so cool that there’s a TikTok dedicated to her, Q Writing about her style. The atmosphere was different this time.
said Rollo Goldstaub, head of global sports partnerships at TikTok. edge In an email, the Paris Games “have all the right ingredients to be the biggest content moment in TikTok history.” In the first five days of the Tokyo Games, 29,000 posts used #olympics, according to Goldstaub. That’s more than 17 times more content than the 521,000 #olympics posts in the first five days of Paris. To date, #olympics has been used in nearly 1 million videos.
What’s clear is that these Games are different from Tokyo, where athletes are quarantined and venues largely empty to stem the spread of the coronavirus. France is also only 6 hours ahead of New York – which is more manageable than the 13-hour time difference between Japan and the East Coast.
According to NBC, TV ratings for the Paris Olympics increased by 79% compared with the Tokyo Olympics, partly due to the comprehensive coverage of the Olympics provided by the streaming platform Peacock. The network has also hired a cadre of more than two dozen influencers to post Olympic content on social media, including TikTok.
Things have also changed in the influencer and content creator industry since the Tokyo Olympics, with athletes copying some of the format and style that TikTok views are used to. There are GRWM (Get Ready With Me) clips of Olympians preparing for the opening ceremony; athletes are doing unboxing videos of their gear, as if they’re sharing Shein’s haul. It’s the same type of content that’s pouring in every day, except in extraordinary circumstances. I wouldn’t be surprised if some athletes continue to produce impactful content after the Paris Olympics.
Apparently, TikTok is also on athletes’ minds. Still basking in the joy of winning gold medals in the team event, U.S. gymnasts Lee and Simone Biles were overheard discussing whether they should be in the video Which popular TikTok tracks are used in. Imagine missing out on an Olympic medal, then taking out your phone and making a video about it in meme format.
Note that this company is being urged by the U.S. government to divest or risk being kicked out of the country. President Joe Biden signed the so-called TikTok ban bill in April, and while it’s unclear what the policy stance of presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will be, she said the U.S. needs to “deal with” its owner ByteDance . Harris joins Biden and other politicians who have supported TikTok’s mandatory divestment bill, having recently joined the platform as her presidential campaign gets underway.
Efforts to force Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok have been fraught with controversy: Details of confidential briefings have not been made public, although some lawmakers have said the United States must take “urgent action” against the company. Politicians who voted to ban TikTok and built their presence on the platform have felt the wrath of users, who they see as hypocritical. While the United States must take national security threats seriously, lawmakers must also grapple with the vast information establishment built on TikTok — which they also help prop up.
TikTok is social media, television, a marketing pipeline, a shopping mall, a music app, a news platform, and now a 24/7 live Olympics broadcast. Lawmakers will need more than just warning the public of the dangers reported by the app to change practices.
Revealed: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, edge‘s parent company.
