With out-of-home viewing now being measured properly (at least one would think), the NFL is reaping the rewards with massive television audiences.
Sunday’s 49ers-Rams NFC Championship Game averaged 50.42 million viewers across FOX and Fox Deportes (50.23M on FOX alone), marking the most-watched conference title game since Patriots-Chiefs on CBS in 2019 (53.90M) and the most-watched NFC Championship since 49ers-Seahawks in 2014 (55.91M).
The Rams’ win, which peaked with 55.22 million from 9:15-9:30 PM ET, ranks as one of just 11 non-Super Bowl television programs to crack the 50 million viewer mark since the series finale of “Seinfeld” in 1998 (76.3M). Ten of those are NFL conference championship games and the other was the series finale of “Friends” 2004 (52.5M).
The out-of-home impact is clear when looking at the household rating (which by definition does not include out-of-home viewing). Of the nine other conference championship games to crack the 50 million mark since ’98, none averaged less than a 28.1 rating. 49ers-Rams had a 23.4.
To put that in perspective, the 2019 Rams-Saints NFC title game was a full point higher in the household ratings (24.5) while averaging six million fewer viewers (44.07M).
In the first 16 months Nielsen included out-of-home viewing in its national figures, the impact on viewership was fairly modest. One culprit was COVID-related restrictions on public life. A bigger one was that Nielsen was undercounting the numbers the whole time.
With the latter now (seemingly) resolved and the former resolved in most of the country, the addition of out-of-home is now having the dramatic impact on sports viewership that had been anticipated when Nielsen first announced the move in 2019.
Comparisons to previous years are complicated by the fact that Nielsen undercounted out of home viewing last year and did not include it at all prior to last year. With that in mind, 49ers-Rams increased 11% in ratings and 19% in viewership from the revised figures for Bills-Chiefs last season (21.1, 42.34M) and 6% and 17% respectively from the pre-OOH figures two years ago (Packers-49ers: 22.0, 42.79M).
It should be noted that while out-of-home is clearly making a difference, every NFL playoff game this year has posted an increase in household ratings (which again, does not include out-of-home). If viewership comparisons to past years are apples-to-oranges, the NFL is doing quite well on an apples-to-apples basis as well.
[Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 2.1, network PR]
