The first season of NASCAR on Amazon Prime Video performed as expected, with across-the-board growth among younger demos offset by a sharp decline among older viewers.
The five-race NASCAR Cup Series package on Amazon Prime Video — the Coca-Cola 600, Michigan, Nashville, Mexico City and Pocono — averaged 2.16 million viewers, per the Nielsen “Big Data” metric, down 16% from the same five race weekends last year, which aired on FOX and FS1 (Coca-Cola 600, St. Louis, Sonoma, Iowa and New Hampshire: 2.56M). Keep in mind last year’s Coca-Cola 600 was impacted by rain.
Though down overall, the Prime Video package posted across-the-board gains in the key young adult demographics, with viewership up 36, 19 and 28 percent respectively in adults 18-34 (233K), 18-49 (601K) and 25-54 (807K). In addition, viewership soared 93 percent among teens 12-17, though the raw audience figure was a mere 56,000.
The growth among young viewers was offset by a sharp decline among viewers over 55, as viewership in that demo declined 36 percent — from 1.79 million last year to 1.14 million this year. Viewers 55+ still made up slightly more than half of the audience (53%), but that was a reduction from the five equivalent races last year — when they accounted for more than two-thirds (70%).
Overall, the five Prime Video races had a median age of 56.1, compared to 62.8 for the other Cup Series races this season. As one would expect, the five races had the five youngest-skewing audiences of the season.
In addition to skewing younger, the Prime Video NASCAR audience was also more affluent — as the average viewer had a median household income of $86,000, compared to $77,300 for all of last year’s linear races.
For a sport like NASCAR that has long been sustained by a rural and older fanbase, these trends may not be welcome by those fans who have expressed the fear that they are being left behind — and priced out — in the streaming era. Nonetheless, it is simply the case that in television, advertisers are generally seeking younger and more affluent audiences.
Prime Video’s NASCAR debut actually fared better relative to the prior year than the first season of Amazon’s NFL Thursday Night Football, which posted a sharper decline in viewership (-28%) and a more modest gain in 18-34 (+11%). It should be noted that viewership has grown for the two subsequent seasons of TNF, with this past season ranking as the most-watched in series history — including the pre-Amazon era — in each of 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54.
In addition to the races themselves, the NASCAR post-race shows on Prime Video averaged 931,000 viewers, retaining 43 percent of the audience. To put that in perspective, that is on par with the retention for the series finale of TNT’s “Inside the NBA” following Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
