The Kentucky Derby delivered a viewership milestone for the second-straight year.
Saturday’s race portion of the Kentucky Derby averaged 17.7 million viewers on NBC, per a combination of Nielsen fast-nationals and Adobe Analytics — surpassing last year (16.7M) to rank as the most-watched edition of the race since 1989 (18.5M).
With a record streaming audience of 959,000 measured by Adobe Analytics — up 34% from last year (714K) — the Nielsen-only viewership figure would clock in around 16.7 million, which would still be the highest for the race since 1989. (Last year’s Nielsen-only figure was 15.9 million.)
Sovreignty’s win peaked with 21.8 million during the 7 PM ET quarter-hour that encompassed the race and its aftermath, up 8% from last year’s peak (20.1M) and the most-watched quarter-hour of the Derby since the event began airing on NBC in 2001.
As always when discussing multi-year highs, keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until earlier this year. There are any number of years that would likely rank higher historically had out-of-home viewing been tracked then, including 2009 (16.3M), 2010 (16.5M), 2013 (16.0M), 2015 (16.0M), 2017 (16.5M) and 2019 (16.5M).
The Derby continues to rank among the very most-watched events in sports television. Excluding football and the Olympics, only two sportscasts in the past year has attracted a larger audience, Game 5 of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series (18.15M) and the Florida-Houston NCAA men’s basketball national championship (18.1M). Keep in mind the “race portion” of the Derby is less than an hour, while other sporting events have to sustain their audiences over the course of two or three hours.
