Thursday Night Football scored its largest audience in months with one of the league’s premier teams on schedule.
The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football (Titans-Packers) averaged a 5.1 rating and 10.32 million viewers on Amazon Prime, marking the highest rated and most-watched Thursday night game in nearly two months — since Dolphins-Bengals in late September (5.7, 11.72M).
The Titans’ win, which peaked with 11.7 million viewers, ranks fourth overall out of the ten Thursday Night Football games this season. After each of the first three games topped the ten million viewer mark, only two have since — one involving Tom Brady (Ravens-Buccaneers: 10.01M) and this week’s game involving Aaron Rodgers.
Continuing a season-long trend, the TNF audience again skewed disproportionately young. Even as Thursday’s game sank double-digits from last year on FOX and NFL Network (Patriots-Falcons: 7.7, ~13.5M), ratings were flat in adults 18-49 (3.7) and jumped 27% in 18-34 (3.2).*
Despite averaging millions fewer viewers, TNF had the same rating in 18-34 as the latest edition of NBC’s Sunday Night Football and comfortably outdrew the latest Monday Night Football game on ESPN (2.8). The median age of Thursday Night Football this season (47) is seven years younger than that of the other NFL broadcasters (54).
TNF is now averaging 9.7 million viewers overall (11.4 million per Amazon’s internal metrics), including 4.91 million in 18-49 (+1%) and 2.24 million in 18-34 (+21%).
* Pending revision of last year’s numbers.
(Nielsen estimates from Programming Insider 11.18, Amazon)
