The live crowds are absolutely dire today. There's literally nobody in the stands.
If Ilves gets a good result today they might get a better showing at the weekend, and Otepää always has that weird factor of the athletics stadium next door to the biathlon stadium so there's always an ocean of empty seats for the disused part of the facility, but NoCo just isn't a draw, and Otepää is rather out of the way, even for day-tripping Finns who might have turned up if Herola or Hirvonen were going well. Even a 'good' audience for NoCo in Estonia will be pretty sparse and it just doesn't look good on the sport.
NoCo tends to come and go in waves; when Jason Lamy Chappuis was the star, the French had a great support team, but after he retired, those same athletes were suddenly completely anonymous, because the team's budget just went through the floor and the French federation focused more on the XC and biathlon teams. Likewise Germany had that run of domination when Eric Frenzel was the best and there were half a dozen Germans in the top 10 every race, but now they've dropped back from prominence and are getting better again in XC and ski jumping. NoCo is a really cool sport, but it's just so peripheral. Ski jumping is such a niche interest that you simply have to take up in childhood, so you will only ever build your field out of people who started out as ski jumpers or who never specialised in either ski jumping or XC, an XC convert will never go to NoCo unless they spent years ski jumping in their youth, so it doesn't have the possibility of replenishing itself through converts the way biathlon does; there is the occasional convert on the women's side (Tara Geraghty-Moats had been a junior biathlete when there was no women's ski jumping World Cup, so she had several years of competing in Nordic sports before she started; same goes for Svenja Würth, who had done youth-level XC alongside ski jumping when there was no professional women's circuit) but none on the men's - and if anything they lose talents to ski jumping because there's more money in that individual sport than the combination. When I've been to the Lahti Ski Games and the Lillehammer events where they have the full schedule of the Nordic sports on, it's always treated as the red-headed stepchild, with the jump taking place bright and early before most of the audience has arrived, and the ski taking place almost as a palate cleanser across lunchtime to allow the audience to get some food and drink between the more valued XC races.
The sport is very much set up to fail, so we shouldn't be surprised when it does just that.