BI notes:

NBC is paying $1.18 billion to carry this summer's Olympic games. In February, the network announced it had already sold $900 million worth of advertising against the event.

Clearly, marketers are ready to spend billions of dollars associating their brands with the Olympics.

So what does Facebook do?

It does half of a smart thing.

That smart half: Facebook built an Olympic hub and an Olympic fan page.

Both are very popular with Facebook users. The hub is brand new, but it's already getting 2,000 "likes" every 15 minutes or so and will get to a couple million in a few weeks. The fan page has been around a bit, and already has 2.8 million "fans" – people who "like" the page and have opted-in to getting updates from it in their News Feed.

So they can build honeypot "tentpole" pages but then they can't monetize like Yahoo does.

Yahoo is rumored to be making more money thanks to Olympics advertising than NBC.

I'm astonished that Facebook has no ads on its Olympics page:

BI writes:

Believe it or not, a better idea for Facebook would be to do what Yahoo does.

Yahoo is still the company that Facebook is trying to take brand advertising spending away from, after all.

Yahoo also creates hubs for big media events like the Olympics.

In fact, such pages are a core part of the companies entire media strategy.

For big news moments like the Olympics, royal weddings, or elections, Yahoo creates "tent-pole" pages and directs traffic to them from its front page and email accounts.

But instead of leaving them ad-free (it's odd to even have to write that), Yahoo displays ad units from big name brands.

These ad units do not make the page look like a Nascar. They are tasteful.

That's true, they're so tasteful that I didn't even notice the Duracell ad in the picture at the top of this page.

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