It is always great to get numbers from the big players on how their Internet video deployments are going. And one of the biggest was undoubtably NBC’s Internet Olympic portal.

After paying $900 million for the exclusive rights, they claim to have sold $1 billion in advertising. Not bad considering no one was even sure that people would watch the Olympics on the Internet.

But watch they did. Over 6.5 million unique visitors to be exact. Which translates into 36 million page views, 826K mobile video views and 300k text or multimedia alerts over 17 days.

That translates into $153 per person and $27 per page view, assuming all the advertising was just on the Internet pages. Silly assumption, of course. But if this test of the viability of the Internet could be profitable, just wait until the next one.

Today I attended the Straight from the Gut Conference held by TIE. This event was sold out, and no tickets were available for walk-ins.

It was a great intro to the Internet industry and a great place to get the latest feelings from the VCs on the current state of venture capital. From the point of view of many entrepeneurs and VCs, this is actually a good time to gauge the quality of the VC firms. The general agreement is that the quality VCs will stay with their selected companies during this economic downturn and the marginal ones will close up shop and get very defensive. An overly defensive fund will end up missing some great companies if they do not continue to invest. After all, good companies are always being created regardless of the economic cycle.

The most interesting part of the show for me was the advertising panel. The people on this panel had real world experience in online advertising including numbers for ad revenues and what new sites that are depending on advertising will need to be successful. One number that I thought that was really interesting is that the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for general web sites has dropped to $0.50. The last that I heard, I thought that social networks and their poor advertising connections were selling for $1-3 per CPM.

Great blog post by Will Richmond on how much CPM the Hulu online video network might be making off of its premium content. He estimates that Hulu is able to charge about $30-$60 CPM. He also estimates that the online shows of Heroes is able to generate around $0.50 - $0.75 /  user / episode. And that is with just about 1 1/2 minutes of ads per show compared to the 20 minutes of ads per show that you currently see on TV.

Busy week in the browser world. Google shocked the world with the beta introduction of their browser called Chrome. Its claim to potential success is that it is supposed to be much fast to load pages.

MIcrosoft is also talking about a new way to load web pages that has the advertising people nervous. Their solution is to block third party sites from loading content on a page. When you are loading a page at some site, like Geogad, you also load content from other companies like Google. In the case of Geogad,  we use both Google Adwords to place some ads and Google Analytics to keep track of the numbers of visitors to the site. There is very little info in the article above, but it suggests that these types of third party software would be stripped from the web page before it is loaded. It would certainly speed things up since you would not have to wait for ads to load, but it would really mess up free software additions like Google Analytics.

Microsoft says that their solution gives people back their privacy. As far as the advertisers, there is nothing that would stop Geogad from displaying its own ads with this new system. The new system will prevent people from being tracked as they go from site to site. It also would be tougher for Google and other advertisers to keep its revenue growing if they lose the ability to serve and track ads. But it may be the only way that Microsoft, with its very popular browser, has to slow down Google.

It looks like Google released their new browser just in time.

This past week had a couple of important milestones for the online video industry. On the plus side, a judge agreed with Veoh that it acted reasonably in how it handled unauthorized content distributed on its site. Veoh polices the content and removes offending material, especially when asked by the copyright holder. This victory for Veoh is a victory for the entire online video industry that allows users to upload content.

On the negative side, NBC reported great audience numbers for its online Olympic video streams. The problem was that they were actually number 2 behind Yahoo. But the really sad part is that despite streaming 72 million videos, they only made $5.75 million or 7.3 cents per stream in video ad revenues. Despite the fact that everyone expected that they would get a large amount of interest from viewers, NBC could not interest many advertisers in including their ads.

But this is only a temporary negative. These great audience numbers will probably convince advertisers to place their ads in the online coverage during the 2010 and 2012 Olympics.