Some say the Olympic Games now under way are all about politics, a coming-out party for China’s ruling regime, which is eager to show that its rise to world-power status is no threat to anyone — except for the Taiwanese, Tibetans, domestic Christians and a few million others in Sudan and Darfur who might be in the way of China’s pursuit of its interests.

Others, including the president of the United States, say the Olympics is all about sport and the athletes who compete — except for the athletes from China, who know it is all about accumulating more medals than the United States, and Zhou Yongkang, the Communist Party’s security chief, who sees the games as giving “full play to the superiority of the socialist system.”

Still others say the games are about business — the grubby art of turning a worldwide attraction into hard cash. All of these observers are probably correct, but this economist will concentrate on the money.

The International Olympic Committee will take in $1.5 billion from the sale of broadcasting rights (no small sum, but still less than half of what broadcasters pay for rights to a National Football League season), $1.2 billion from the right to use the Olympic logo and other sponsorships, $240 million from ticket sales, and $60 million from miscellaneous sources.

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Eight percent of that $3 billion will go to the care and feeding of IOC staff, the bunch that initially barred some Iraqi athletes because their government was too involved in athletics — unlike the host Chinese!

The business lessons of the Olympics are several, among them that great sporting events are one of the few happenings that can still attract a mass audience — in this case, 4 billion people — in a media world in which hundreds of channels and multiple delivery platforms fragment audiences.

There are two reasons for this. Like with reality television shows, the endgame is unpredictable. We more or less know that the good guys will get the girls in sitcoms, and that the last man standing will be our favorite star in shoot-’em-ups. No real suspense there. But sports are different: The contest isn’t over until the fat man tosses his hammer.

Second, as David Hill, Fox Sport’s brilliant chairman, chief executive officer and impresario, once explained to me, sports are tribal. Groups of friends rarely gather to share a sitcom or film. But put a major sporting event on the screen — such as the Super Bowl or the World Cup — and the only question is at whose home we should gather for the best snacks.

Then there are the sponsors. In a year in which advertising dollars are hard to come by, sponsors line up to shell out for advertising time amid major sporting events.

Twelve main global sponsors of the IOC, including Coca-Cola, Visa and McDonald’s, each pay $100 million for the right to partner with the IOC in each Games cycle (Winter, Summer) and to use the Olympic logos. In addition, 10 to 15 sponsors are selected by each host city and given the privilege of inking multimillion-dollar national sponsorship contracts.

The Olympics also teaches that any media company that plans to bid for an event on the scale of the Beijing Games had better have multiple platforms available to distribute pictures, text, commentary and, of course, commercials.

NBC, which has the U.S. rights, is offering 2,000 hours of live video coverage and 3,000 hours of on-demand video on its Web site. It plans to show its advertisers, who pay some $750,000 for a 30-second spot, that the old system of merely counting those who watch on NBC and its other channels (CNBC, MSNBC and Oxygen) is as obsolete as a black-and-white TV set.

So NBC will issue a daily total audience measurement index, or TAMI, that adds to the usual Nielsen television ratings all those who have accessed its Web sites using computers, BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.

TAMI is aimed at persuading sponsors that they are indeed getting a big bang for their bucks. If successful, the system will be used to rate NBC’s fall lineup, and eventually by other networks.

Since the newly measured audience is likely to consist largely of the young viewers advertisers lust after, this would be a great leap forward for broadcasters.

Whether these mass audiences will remember only the fireworks and the wonderful athletes, or China’s goose-stepping military and the restrictions the regime imposed on journalists, will determine whether the communist government’s multibillion-dollar investment to gain international approval paid off.

Examiner Columnist Irwin Stelzer is a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Studies.