Out-of-home viewing may be out-of-sight and out-of-mind, but on Thanksgiving Day it played an outsized role in the NFL’s viewership bonanza.
Of the 41.76 million viewers watching Commanders-Cowboys on CBS Thanksgiving Day — the second-largest regular season NFL audience on record — a whopping 17.25 million were doing so out-of-home, or 41%. That exceeds last year’s out-of-home lift of 39% for Giants-Cowboys.
Take out the out-of-home audience and the game averaged 24.51 million, lower than any Cowboys Thanksgiving game in the 11 years prior to 2020, the year when Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its final nationals. Even Chargers-Cowboys in 2017, the year of the “NFL ratings panic,” averaged 26.28 million.
Packers-Lions averaged 33.70 million viewers on FOX — the largest audience on record for a Lions Thanksgiving game — of which 10.37 million were watching out-of-home (31%). The in-home audience of 23.32 million trails every Lions Thanksgiving game in the decade prior to 2020.
As for the nightcap, 49ers-Seahawks averaged a Nielsen-measured audience of 24.78 million, of which 7.26 million were watching out-of-home (29%). The in-home audience of 17.25 million trails all-but-one of NBC’s Thanksgiving games prior to 2020, Giants-Washington in 2016 (16.91M).
While all sporting events have benefited from the inclusion of out-of-home viewing, that benefit is particularly pronounced on holidays like Thanksgiving, which feature a greater-than-usual level of communal viewing.
The impact of out-of-home viewing is clear when looking at the household rating, which by definition does not include out-of-home viewing. The 11.9 for Commanders-Cowboys is the lowest for the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game since 2017 (Chargers-Cowboys: 11.1) and the second-lowest since 2009 (Raiders-Cowboys: 11.6). Packers-Lions was the highest rated Detroit game on Thanksgiving since 2019 with an 11.9 rating, but ranks as the fifth-lowest going back to 2009. The 9.2 rating for 49ers-Seahawks is the third-lowest for a primetime Thanksgiving game on NBC (dates back to 2012).
It is worth noting that the out-of-home era has not necessarily inflated viewership, but instead shown just how undercounted viewing was in the previous era. The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game has averaged at least 40 million viewers in three of four years since out-of-home was added to the mix (the lone exception being 2020, when Thanksgiving gatherings were actively discouraged). It is highly likely that those games would have been regularly averaging over 40 million had out-of-home been included in prior years. Given the size of the out-of-home lift this year, it is entirely possible that games like Washington-Dallas in 2016 (35.11M) would have surpassed the 50 million mark.
(It is also worth noting that out-of-home viewing is no guarantee of ratings records, as any observer of recent viewership trends for the World Series, NBA Finals, Stanley Cup Final and the national championships of college football and basketball can attest — though those events generally do not take place on national holidays.)
