Welcome back to “The Needle,” a new ratings-focused column on Sports Media Watch that will break down the numbers, attempt to put some context behind the data, and discuss broader trends in measurement and television viewing.
For those who follow sports media (and sports ratings) closely, Sunday is a day of significance. Not because of the Indy 500, which is debuting on FOX. Not because the Indiana Pacers could take a 3-0 lead on the New York Knicks, moving the NBA closer to its smallest-market Finals in memory. Nearly 600 miles outside of this weekend’s sports mecca, Indianapolis, the Coca-Cola 600 from Charlotte, N.C. will mark a milestone in sports TV viewing: the first Nielsen-measured sporting event outside of the NFL to air exclusively on a streaming service.
By milestone standards, that may sound underwhelming. But do not overlook the significance. Thus far, all of the Nielsen rated, streaming-exclusive sporting events have been NFL games, not exactly the biggest stress test of whether platforms like Prime Video and Peacock can truly compete with traditional cable, much less broadcast. Viewers have largely followed the NFL from one platform to another, but will they make the same effort for NASCAR or the NBA?
We will soon know the answer. All five NASCAR Cup Series races on Prime Video will be Nielsen-measured. (Prime will be using the new Nielsen Big Data figures, but as those are retroactive to 2023, there will still be year-over-year comparisons.)
To this point, viewership for non-NFL streaming exclusives has remained elusive, surfacing only when the networks feel like disclosing them — and that has been a rare occasion. NBC has publicized the Adobe Analytics-measured viewership for a handful of Peacock-exclusive Premier League matches, but that is about it. How does college basketball on Peacock fare? How does the NHL do on ESPN+? Is there an audience for MLB and MLS on Apple TV+? Outside of the streamers themselves, nobody knows.
That will by and large remain the case, but as streaming services acquire the kind of top tier sports rights that have largely been the domain of cable and broadcast, Nielsen measurement will become an expectation. It is one thing to lack such data for a handful of college basketball games that would not have been televised anyway, and quite another for one of the marquee NASCAR races of the season.
The annual Coca-Cola 600, a staple of Memorial Day weekend, has aired on broadcast television every year since FOX began carrying NASCAR in 2001. Last year’s race, which was shortened due to rain and aired opposite the rain-delayed Indy 500, was the least-watched in the FOX era with 3.10 million viewers. While that is a low figure for broadcast, it exceeds every Cup Series race on cable in the past four years — and assuming that streaming viewership will generally trail that of cable, it may be a bar too high for this year’s race to reach.
The chance of the 600 again outdrawing the Indy 500 — as it did every year from 2001-15 — may be faint for the time being.
In race one of a seven-year contract, NASCAR is understandably looking long-term. “I think where we’d like to see the trajectory of the NASCAR Amazon partnership is probably similar to what the NFL is experiencing on Thursday Night Football,” NASCAR Senior Vice President, Broadcasting & Innovation Brian Herbst told Sports Media Watch this week, “where there’s a baseline to start the partnership and then it grows over time.”
The first year of TNF on Amazon averaged just shy of 9.6 million viewers, down more than a quarter from the prior year on FOX and NFL Network, and the least-watched season of the franchise since 2013. But that audience has steadily grown, rising to 11.9 million in 2023 and 13.2 million this past season, with the latter mark basically even with the final pre-Amazon year in 2021 (13.3M).
“I think we’ll have a baseline that becomes a little bit more clear after the Coca-Cola 600,” Herbst continued, “and then the expectation over the course of the seven-year partnership with Amazon is to migrate more and more fans over to Amazon Prime and to have more of our fan base familiar with and subscribing to Prime Video.”
For a sport that generally trends older, moving races from broadcast television to streaming is potentially risky. If Thursday Night Football is a guide, it may take older viewers a few seasons to transition to clicking on an app, rather than flipping to a channel. The bright side is that younger audiences — for whom streaming is second nature — may be more likely find their way to the races.
“The long-term strategic play for us is to make sure that we are relevant in the streaming space, where the over-index is with younger viewers — cord-nevers in particular, or cord-cutters,” Herbst said. In year one of TNF, viewership among adults 18-34 actually increased 11 percent, despite the overall decline from the prior year.
It is hard to overstate how the success of Thursday Night Football — particularly in attracting younger viewers — has made streaming a realistic option for other properties. But some caution is merited. TNF and NASCAR are not necessarily analogous.
The reason why TNF is the standard by which all successors are judged is because it is the only major streaming package tracked by Nielsen on a week-to-week basis. Whatever one may think of Nielsen, it as of now remains the agreed-upon standard of measurement — and is the only option for the kind of demographic data that sustains the industry. It may be the case that expectations based on the performance of Thursday Night Football (or the NFL broadly) are not applicable to NASCAR, or even to the NBA. Starting this week, there will be data to determine that one way or the other.
The Indy 500 long ago regained its spot as the most-watched motorsports event of Memorial Day weekend, but with the Coca-Cola 600 headed to streaming and the F1 Monaco Grand Prix moving to June after this season, “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” may come to dominate this weekend in the coming years.
Plus: NBA on Memorial Day and more
Years ago, Memorial Day was a special day on the NBA calendar, featuring a matinee conference final game on NBC (or an actual NBA Finals game on CBS, the further back one goes). Those games averaged tens of millions of viewers throughout the 1990s, reaching as high as the mid-teens in the Michael Jordan era. Even after viewership receded in the early 2000s, NBC still programmed Memorial Day as a pro basketball showcase, airing WNBA-NBA doubleheaders in its final three years with the leagues.
Under the current media rights deal that began in 2002 and ends this year, Memorial Day has largely lost its place in NBA lore. In the first year of the deal, there was no game on the holiday at all — the first of several years over the past two decades in which the NBA took Memorial Day off. Thanks to a combination of COVID delays and calendar quirks, Monday’s Thunder-Timberwolves Game 4 will be just the third NBA game on the holiday since 2018.
Memorial Day is not like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s or Easter, where families tend to gather inside the home, producing massive viewership numbers. It is more like the Fourth of July, a holiday that draws viewers away from their homes — and TV sets.
Nevertheless, for a league that has had the “Memorial Day massacre” and multiple “Memorial Day miracles,” it seems like a missed opportunity to not lean into what was once a meaningful connection. Perhaps the new media rights deal, which will bring the NBA back to NBC, could provide the opportunity to restart a tradition.
New on “The Needle,” a roundup of some notable viewership figures from the past week. For up-to-date viewership numbers, see the SMW Sports Ratings Tracker.
- 2.7 million: The audience for last Saturday’s Fever-Sky WNBA opening weekend game, the largest WNBA regular season audience since 2000. Not a wholly surprising figure, given the anticipation for Caitlin Clark’s second season — and the outsized interest in her perceived rivalry with Angel Reese — but certainly an encouraging one.
- 2.5 million: The audience for the Mets-Yankees Subway Series on ESPN last Sunday night, the largest Sunday Night Baseball audience since 2018. The ‘shrinking platform’ Rob Manfred decried in February delivered the largest MLB audience of the season in May. Perhaps that game would have fared even better on broadcast TV, but for some reason the teams’ meeting the previous day aired on MLB Network instead of FOX. (Across MLB Network, SNY and YES, it drew 910,000 viewers).
- 3.6 million: The season-to-date average for the PGA TOUR on CBS this season, up 13% from last year and the highest at this point of the season since 2019.
- 4.6 million: The race portion audience for last weekend’s Preakness Stakes, topping only the COVID-delayed 2020 edition as the smallest for the race since it began airing on NBC in 2001. The Kentucky Derby winner skipped the race.
