For the second straight year, nationwide viewership of Super Bowl LI slipped somewhat from the previous year, but the audience was still quite substantial:
Tom Brady? Overtime? An incredible Super Bowl comeback?
All the ingredients were there for a Super Bowl ratings bonanza. But viewership for the New England Patriots’ 34-28 overtime victory over the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday night was down slightly compared with last year’s game between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers.
Sunday’s game drew 111.3 million viewers on Fox, a high enough total to tie it for fourth place among the most-viewed programs in TV history but lower than last year’s 111.9 million.
This was the eighth consecutive year that the Super Bowl exceeded 100 million viewers. And the game’s wild ending — especially after what looked like a certain blowout, with the Falcons holding a commanding 25-point lead late into the third quarter — brought in a huge audience. The game peaked between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. with a 52.1 rating and a 74 share, higher than at any point during last year’s game, according to Nielsen.
Lady Gaga’s halftime performance drew 117.5 million viewers, making it the second-most-watched halftime show, behind Katy Perry’s performance two years ago.
Fox said on Monday that when streams from its Fox Sports Go app and its Spanish-language sports channel, Fox Deportes, were added in, the viewership reached 113.7 million viewers, tying it for the second-best multiplatform performance in Super Bowl history.
This was the eighth consecutive year that the Super Bowl exceeded 100 million viewers. And the game’s wild ending — especially after what looked like a certain blowout, with the Falcons holding a commanding 25-point lead late into the third quarter — brought in a huge audience. The game peaked between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. with a 52.1 rating and a 74 share, higher than at any point during last year’s game, according to Nielsen.
Lady Gaga’s halftime performance drew 117.5 million viewers, making it the second-most-watched halftime show, behind Katy Perry’s performance two years ago.
Fox said on Monday that when streams from its Fox Sports Go app and its Spanish-language sports channel, Fox Deportes, were added in, the viewership reached 113.7 million viewers, tying it for the second-best multiplatform performance in Super Bowl history.
Still, for the second consecutive year, the Super Bowl failed to set a ratings record, and the game capped a troubling yearlong trend for the National Football League. Ratings for games in the 2016-17 regular season were down 9 percent from the previous year and were off 6 percent through the first three weeks of the playoffs, according to the research firm MoffettNathanson.
N.F.L. executives argued that the outsize interest in November’s election was responsible for siphoning away viewers, but the ratings, down 12 percent during the election season, were still down 5 percent after it.
Primetime games were hit the hardest. ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” had the biggest loss in viewership, declining 13 percent from the year before. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was down 11 percent, and Thursday night games were down 9 percent. And even the local Sunday afternoon games had viewership fall 7 percent this season, according to MoffettNathanson.
In all honesty, the small dips in viewership that we’ve seen for the past two years aren’t really very statistically significant. The fact still stands that the Super Bowl is the one time every year that large audiences are all tuned into the same program for an expanded period of time. The only other possible exception is during a time when a major ‘Breaking News’ event is taking place, but those are typically times when multiple networks are covering the event and there is often very little time for commercial breaks. If you want to reach 100,000,000 households or more, the Super Bowl broadcast is your one opportunity every year to be guaranteed that you’ll be able to do so. That’s the main reason networks are able to get away with charging high prices for commercial time during the game. This is likely to remain true for a long, long time no matter how much television viewing and media consumption habits are likely to change. Additionally, it’s likely that at least part of the reason for the viewership drop is the fact that the Super Bowl broadcast was available over the Internet for many people, meaning that there was likely some audience out there that wasn’t being completely measured. As time goes on, it’s likely that the methods to determine how many viewers are accessing a video stream will be improved, and the NFL will no doubt find a way to extract revenue for this new and expanding audience.
The news of another Super Bowl viewership drop capped off a season in which, for many weeks, there were repeated reports that ratings for weekly NFL games were slipping compared to previous years. There were various theories why this was the case. Some speculated that years of reports about concussions and the league’s failure to properly support players was turning the public off. Conservatives claimed that the controversy that started the season off when San Francisco 49ers Quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem was the reason why many Americans stopped watching the games. There is, however, no evidence that Kaepernick’s actions and those of others had any real impact at all on viewers. The NFL opined that all the media attention on the upcoming Presidential election was impacting viewers’ media choices and impacting ratings for everyone, and there was some support for that argument when ratings returned to what has been a historic norm across the past several seasons. Others have speculated that the fact that NFL games are no longer limited to Sundays is, some extent, diluting overall viewership. In addition to Sunday’s, this season alone there were games every Sunday night, every Monday night, and every Thursday night, and games on Saturday at the end of the season in December. Arguably, this many games over the course of the week has an impact on whether or not people are watching. This is one reason that the NFL is reportedly considering ending the Thursday night game and returning to the time when games were played during the day on Sunday and during prime time on Sunday and Monday evenings. One final explanation, of course, is the fact that streaming of games has become more and more common and this may be taking people away from televisions on game day, especially if streaming means they can watch their favorite teams rather than whatever is being broadcast in their area on a given week.
Whatever the explanation, as I said, 111 million people watching all at once is hard to ignore.
