NFL Ratings: How Tough Games, Non-Traditional Telecasts & Taylor Swift Helped Score League’s Best Regular Season Audience In Years
13.01.2024 - 17:19
/ deadline.com
The NFL is headed into the playoffs with its head held high after scoring the best regular season audience in years.
Across all games, the regular season averaged 17.9M viewers on linear and digital platforms. That’s the highest since 2015 — tied with 2010 for the second-best season on record, which dates back to 1995. The most-watched game of the season was the Commanders-Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day with more than 40M tuning in.
The audience was up 7% year-over-year in terms of total audience, while the increase in viewership ranged from 4% to 10% in key demographics. Among the under 35 crowd, viewership was the highest it’s been since 2019.
Compared to last year, male viewership saw a 6% lift, while female viewership ballooned by 9%, marking the highest female viewership the NFL has ever recorded (with recording beginning in 2000).
All of this bodes very well for the playoffs, as Disney, Paramount, Fox Corp., NBCUniversal and Amazon are wrapping up the second year of a decade-long media rights deal, with the collective tab in the range of $110 billion. Streaming is a cornerstone of that spending, with Peacock paying an additional $100 million for the exclusive rights to a wild card game. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football exclusive posted a 24% uptick in viewership in Year 2.
One more sign of the streaming times has been the arrival of YouTube as a major partner. The digital video giant earlier this year took over Sunday Ticket, a popular regular season package that had been controlled for 29 years by DirecTV.
But what is behind the growing audience for the NFL? American football is without a doubt the most-watched program in the United States. Tens of millions of people tune in every week, and it is arguably what