UPDATE: A winner of the Miss USA Pageant was crowned at the Grand Sierra Resort on Thursday night.
Cheslie Kryst of North Carolina won the competition out of 51 contestants from every state, including the District of Columbia.
She was chosen by a panel of accomplished female entrepreneurs who are industry experts and former pageant winners.
The Miss Teen USA pageant was held earlier this week with KTVN's own Kristen Remington serving as one of the judges.
This was Reno's first time ever hosting the pageants.
Miss USAOriginal Story: The Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants are at the Grand Sierra Resort this week, and the GSR along with the Reno Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority (RSCVA) are thrilled for this level of exposure.
The Miss Teen USA pageant was streamed online Sunday. The Miss USA pageant starts Monday and the winner is crowned Thursday.
The contestants came to northern Nevada more than a week ago. They visited several popular areas in northern Nevada which will be shown during the pageant.
"The main idea is that we're going to get quite a bit of TV coverage nationally and internationally," Communications Manager for RSCVA Ben McDonald says. "And a fair amount of that is going to have features on the Reno-Tahoe area."
While the broadcast will allow millions to see some of the beautiful places in northern Nevada, McDonald says the best exposure for the area may actually be on social media.
"We're seeing tons of social media hits which is probably going to be the number one way we're reaching potential visitors to the area right now." McDonald says. "We have 104 contestants in the area all acting as brand ambassadors, influencers on social media. Primarily on Instagram, which is the number one platform for our target demographic which is young travelers ... Contestants are using the Reno-Tahoe hashtag, and they are definitely posting very positive storylines of the greater Reno-Tahoe area."
The pageant is in the Grand Theater at the GSR, and Senior Vice President of Marketing Christopher Abraham says the online traffic is remarkable.
"The social media, digital media, the visits to our website, our pages and the Reno-Tahoe pages has been... we've seen a dramatic increase and a dramatic level on interest in our community."
Often times when measuring the 'popularity' of an event in terms of tourism, hotel rooms purchased help measure how many visitor we get. For this event, most of the rooms were actually comped, along with the food, banquet space and the theater, because the exposure is so important.
"We're thrilled to do that in order to allow the destination the exposure we so richly would like here," Abraham says. "And invite many other people not just domestically but internationally to our fabulous community."
In fact, he says this is the biggest event ever in the Grand Theater.
"We host 80, 90 great concerts a year here, we also hosted an ESPN live boxing event," Abraham says. "But I think by far Miss USA, live in 70 countries around the world and domestically, is the largest-scale event we've hosted here at the Grand Theater."
McDonald says based on projections, they expect four to five million more viewers for Thursday's broadcast than Sunday's online stream on the Miss Teen USA pageant.
He also says as a part of the contract, the pageant and its contestants have to reach 70 million impressions on social media during the week. That means all the posts combined must be viewed 70 million times, and that's a lot of eyes on northern Nevada.
