The Olympics weren’t just a boon for NBCU’s TV viewership this summer — they made a huge splash on social, as recent data from CreatorIQ reveals. Last month, we noted the boost in Earned Media Value Peacock received before the Games had even begun, a trend that only intensified as the Olympics kicked off in Paris. 

In total, Peacock racked up $53.1 million in Earned Media Value (EMV) in July, a 55% month-over-month increase that put it second only to Netflix in terms of video streamers’ EMV. EMV is CreatorIQ’s metric for quantifying the estimated value of consumer engagement with digital earned media. 

Olympics-related posts fueled 44% of the Peacock’s total EMV for the month, with Team USA emerging as a key player, generating $6.8 million in EMV from 276 posts. Social action around the Games also drove month-over-month increases in Peacock’s total engagements (+84% vs. June) and impressions (+54%). 

CreatorIQ also analyzed the Olympics’ impact for the social media platforms themselves, with Instagram taking the gold medal for overall coverage. From July 1 through August 13, Olympics-related content on Instagram generated a whopping $1.2 billion in EMV, with over 48,000 creators sharing more than 123,000 posts that resulted in 18.7 billion impressions. On TikTok, there were nearly 14 billion impressions on posts related to the Games, which resulted in $520.7 million in EMV across the platform. 

“If you add up the EMV, engagements and impressions from all of these platforms, it comes to a very high monthly total that puts the Olympics as a brand on the same level as some of the biggest names in our database, like Nike or Fashion Nova, and roughly on par with what we’d expect for a sports team in the month that it wins a championship,” said Alex Rawitz, Director of Research and Insights at CreatorIQ. “These metrics reaffirm the Olympics' central place on the social media calendar, uniting creators from various focus areas and communities.”