The Digital Skeptic: Olympic Flame Lights Way to Web Profits

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- The next time Tim Berners-Lee invents the Internet, he might want to think of a series of interlocking rings -- maybe like those of the Olympics -- rather than the wide open, worldwide wreck he made the first time around.

We all know Berners-Lee. He is the supposed "founder" of the Internet. (Someone has to take the bullet, right?) And he was the cherry on top of the opening ceremony honoring all things British at this year's London Olympic games.

In case you missed it, he was the geek at the computer typing a four-word tweet: "This is for everyone."

For my money, Berners-Lee's Olympic tweet was a thunderbolt of business optimism -- and a legit path to profits online.

Here's why.

Bringing order to the global village
Think about what happened when Berners-Lee typed those words. First, he was putting the crown on one of the most valuable media moments in recent memory. Ad time ain't cheap when 80-some-odd-thousand people are watching live in London, according to Yahoo! Sports (YHOO) and another 40-some-odd-million from the U.S, according to widely quoted Nielsen figures. Guesstimates say 1 billion viewers tuned in worldwide.

What made the moment so valuable? Certainly not the disorganized, crowdsourced digital domain. Berners-Lee's microblog was one of -- oh my heavens -- some 6.3 million tweets typed during the opening ceremony, according to TweetReach. Without the spectacle, his was as worthless as the rest.

Facebook (FB), too, was no profit medalist. It ran, what, a running timeline of images and events of the opening ceremony. I didn't care. Did you?

In truth, it was carefully orchestrated interlocking system of highly organized media rights, international viewing windows and controlled media technologies that made this ceremony money.

The stiff upper British lip of structure put food on the table for this year's games.

NBCOlympics.com gets the gold
The most interesting example of order trumping chaos to investors -- and the theme is everywhere in these games of you look -- is clearly NBCOlympics.com. Comcast's (CMCSA) NBC bragged about the depth of online video coverage -- all 32 sports, all 302 events and all streamed live was the oft-hyped boast. But was the site open to all, a la the rest of the dysfunctional Web?

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