American Gladiators Pushes Viewers to the Web; How's it Doing and Where Are the Videos?

American Gladiators has been a big hit for NBC this season. When the show kicked off earlier this year, the episodes were 90 minutes to two hours in length and each event in the competition was shown in full. As the season moved on, the show moved into a one-hour slot and with the change, came a change in the way the show is broadcast.

With the new episodes (including last night's), some of the events are not shown in full. For those events that are shown only in a short clip, the announcers point American Gladiator viewers to the Web to watch the full event. I am trying to get some numbers from NBC on how well this strategy is working and will report back once I get the detailed stats. While I assume some viewers are sitting at their computers while watching and will load the Web site immediately, I can't picture many people getting off the couch or recliner to watch Python beat someone in the Terminator. By the time the show is over, the draw to online dips even further.

The more important question is, where are the videos? I loaded americangladiators.com and found what appears to be about 20% new version and 80% old version. There are some promo videos including a promo for an episode that aired weeks ago. The other content, from cast bios to images and games, is all from the old series 10+ years ago.

The new content is all housed on NBC's Web site including full episodes. What I don't see anywhere is the specific events that were cutoff on the live TV version. Do I really need to sit through the full hour if I only want to see what happened in the Joust?

I think NBC is making a big mistake by not updating the American Gladiators main .com site. While it's important to display content from the old version, the new version is where it's at now. In fact, on the americangladiators.com site, there's one tiny link over to NBC. At least redirect the domain. How much traffic, ad impressions and even more importantly, high paying video ad impressions is NBC losing because of this poor online strategy?

(in case you are interested, my favorites are Jet, Justice and Crush, do you have a favorite?)