As Olympic coverage changes, the pressure to monetize every moment grows

Every two years, publishers gear up for the Olympic Games, looking to capture, measure and monetize the attention spike.

Reporting the event results doesn’t distinguish one news outlet from another, but the story behind the scores does. And that distinction is increasingly shaping how publishers approach the Games, as they look to stand out with original reporting rather than SEO-driven recaps.

This is the new monetization reality for publishers: Winning isn’t solely about volume.

“Olympic monetization success isn’t just about capturing traffic spikes,” Eric Herd, global head of sports and emerging products at Yieldmo, told The Current. “It’s about rights, distribution, cultural relevance and whether publishers can identify moments and narratives that travel across platforms and persist beyond the Games themselves.”

And this Olympics is a microcosm of how publishers, marketers and brands are keeping up with the AI-driven, social-first world by turning fleeting moments into ones with lasting emotional value.

The Olympics modernizes its strategy

AI search has made major strides since the 2024 Summer Games, with OpenAI citing 800 million monthly active users at the end of 2025. Still, Adam Schenkel, chief operating officer at GumGum, believes that fans aren’t instinctively using LLMs to access the latest Olympic news. This leaves news outlets in the pole position.

“Publishers are well-positioned to continue winning in these moments,” Schenkel told The Current. “They can create and distribute content faster than ever, localize it for different markets, translate it and make it live within moments of an event. [This makes] it more valuable for fans and, in turn, for advertisers.”

That speed comes as fans interact with the Olympics at different moments during their day. Watching highlights between meetings, listening to podcasts on the way home and reading a moving story about an Olympian in the morning.

For the first time ever, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will make competition footage available to sponsors in real time, allowing brands to mix Olympic moments into their ads during the Games. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but in today’s age, it’s crucial to capture attention.

On top of that, NBCUniversal is once again giving over 25 creators unbridled access to the events, allowing them to capture and connect with their audiences. This was a major success during the Summer Olympics in Paris, with the creators reaping 300 million views across social.

While much of that activity plays out on social, PadSquad's Lance Wolder said the bigger opportunity is about owning the moments themselves — not just the platforms where they first appear.

It’s more about “adjacency to the moments that become memories: the recaps, the rapid-response highlights, the clips that get replayed for years. Publishers have an opportunity to curate that immediacy and make it accessible to advertisers beyond the socially native brands that have traditionally owned it,” according to Wolder.

Tapping into that emotion through stories can be a major tactic for advertisers.

“The smart move is to build more than a sponsorship with a pile of impressions; instead, package experiences that hold attention, prove impact and perform when the stakes are highest,” Wolder added.