YouTube viewers watched over 40 billion minutes of Olympic content

This year’s Olympic Games were a sight to behold if you’re a fan of sports. In fact, it drew in a big enough audience to become the most streamed Olympics in history. But you might be wondering how much time the world spent watching the event. It’s been almost two weeks since the games ended and now YouTube is sharing its viewing stats.

In a new blog, YouTube has revealed how long people were glued to their seats watching the Paris Olympics. The numbers are quite astronomical, to say the least.

According to YouTube, over 40 billion minutes (650+ million hours) were spent watching Olympic content on the platform. On top of that, Olympic content netted over 12 billion views, with over 850 million being unique viewers.

The company breaks these numbers down further claiming that over 18 billion minutes were watched in front of a TV, with over 35% of watchtime happening in the living room. It appears the TV accounted for 1.9 billion views and 180 million unique viewers.

These numbers are pretty impressive, especially when you factor in that this doesn’t account for how many people were watching on cable and/or Peacock. According to CNN, NBCUniversal says it drew in 30.6 million viewers and they logged in 23.5 billion minutes of watch time. This led to the 2024 Olympics having an 82% raise in viewership compared to the Tokyo Olympics and a “40% increase compared to all prior summer and winter Games combined.”