Out-of-home viewing played a major role in this year’s resurgent Super Bowl audience, taking the game from under 90 million to more than 110.
Super Bowl 57 (Chiefs-Eagles) averaged 23.988 million out-of-home viewers, or 21% of the linear FOX audience of 112.173 million. Without out-of-home viewing included, the FOX audience would have been 88.19 million, making this year’s Super Bowl the third-straight with fewer than 90 million in-home viewers.
Prior to the past three years, in-home viewership — the standard for decades until the era of out-of-home — had not fallen below the 90 million mark since Patriots-Eagles in 2005 (86.07M).
Looking just at the era of out-of-home viewing, which Nielsen first began tracking in 2016 and then began incorporating into its viewership estimates in 2020, this year’s Super Bowl audience ranks a middle-of-the-pack fourth out of seven. Viewership easily outpaced the past two years, when the game failed to crack the 100 million mark even with out-of-home (and fell below 80 million without it).
With out-of-home included, this year’s Super Bowl audience hit a six-year high — but that comes with a caveat. Out-of-home viewing was measured in the four prior years (2017-20) but not included in Nielsen’s final nationals. Adding out-of-home viewing to those prior year figures, this year’s audience of 112.2 million trails 2020 (Chiefs-49ers: 114.3M), 2018 (Eagles-Patriots: 117.3M) and the high water mark of 123.9 million set by Patriots-Falcons in 2017.
Super Bowl out-of-home viewership breakdown
It is worth noting that the out-of-home audience has grown considerably over the past three years. Out-of-home viewing ranged from 12 to 14 million from 2017-20, a figure surpassed even by the reduced-capacity COVID-era Super Bowl of 2021 (15.4M). It is impossible to imagine that the out-of-home audience in 2021 was higher than in the four prior (pre-COVID) years; a more likely explanation is that Nielsen made some sort of methodological change when it began incorporating out-of-home into final nationals in 2020.
As one would expect, the percentage of out-of-home viewers has also risen sharply — ranging from 10-12 percent from 2017-20 before rising to 16% in 2021 and north of 20% the past two years.
