Welcome back to “The Needle,” a 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.
In the most recent edition of John Ourand’s Puck newsletter, an anonymous media executive laid into Amazon Prime Video’s messaging regarding its ratings:
Amazon Prime makes more than $44 billion in subscription revenue, probably over 1,000x what they make in NASCAR ad sales. It’s preposterous to suggest there’s a meaningful difference in ARPU [Average Revenue Per User] between over 55s and under 55s when all the revenue is subscription-based. The aggressively ageist attitude Amazon takes toward the oldest and most loyal fans of NASCAR (and the NFL) is embarrassing.
The critique is worth exploring. To begin with, what is Amazon’s primary focus when it comes to live sports? Subscriptions or television ratings? The answer would seem obvious. For the streamers, subscriptions are the main goal and the primary reason to obtain sports rights — not just to drive subscriptions, but to maintain them over time, avoiding the churn that might otherwise take place.
For the most part, live sports on streamers have not even been Nielsen-rated — save for NFL games and now, most recently, NASCAR.
At the same time, there is a reason why those NFL games and NASCAR races have been rated. Yes, there was no universe in which streamers were going to air live sports commercial free; just the cost alone would demand some additional revenue stream. But it is also true that the streaming business has generally come to embrace advertising as a necessary component of the business.
At the outset of the streaming era in 2009, purchasing a subscription to Netflix or Hulu meant watching countless television shows and movies ad-free for far less than the price of cable, an incredible deal for the subscriber — but less so for the streamers. Over time, the industry began shifting to lower-cost ad-supported plans that on a revenue per-user basis outperform the higher-priced ad-free options, with even Netflix abandoning its anti-advertising stance in 2022.
As long as advertising revenue matters, so too does the issue of age. There has long been some level of confusion as to why television prioritizes young viewership. Some have argued that the standard 18-49 demographic is outdated. Why should older audiences, who generally have more spending money than their youthful counterparts, take a backseat?
That question fundamentally misunderstands why advertisers are paying for commercial time. Yes, older viewers are valuable to a great number of advertisers. They also watch a lot more television, meaning they are far easier to reach, meaning that advertisers will of course not pay as much money to reach them.
Younger viewers on the other hand, watch considerably less linear television. While linear viewing is surely declining across all demographics, younger viewers are those who in some cases have no habit for watching traditional TV in the first place.
It is 2025 now, which means that the youngest adults were born in 2007. An 18-year-old today was born into a world where YouTube and social media already existed; was months old when the iPhone was introduced, beginning the smartphone era; was two when the streaming era began in earnest; was three when the iPad came out. Some surely grew up watching ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX on a 4×3 CRT television, but probably not nearly as many as grew up with a tablet in hand.
Young adults never watched as much TV as their older counterparts — and all the sociological reasons for that are immaterial to this article — but in the old days they at least watched some of the time. Now, they are on social media.
The recent Game 7 of the NBA Finals was as good an indication as any of the state of television. The June 22 contest averaged a whopping 71 share in adults 18-34, meaning that nearly three out of every four adults under 35 watching television were tuned to the game. But how many adults under 35 were watching television?
The game had a 4.4 rating in the demo, meaning 4.4% of adults 18-34 accounted for 71% of the demographic’s television usage. One can conclude that of the entire 18-34 demographic, only 6.2% were watching television on a Sunday night, the most-watched night of the week. To put that in perspective, it was less than a decade ago that NBA Finals games were by themselves attracting 6.2% of adults 18-34, and that only accounted for 31 percent of viewing in the demo (meaning that the total 18-34 rating that night was around 20).
Based on the Game 7 numbers in adults 18-49 (5.15 rating and 58 share) and 25-54 (5.83 and a 50 share), 8.9% and 11.7% of the respective demographics were watching television that night — with about half watching something other than the NBA. Those are not great figures, but they are indicative of a greater use of television among those demos. More people watching the game, more people watching the competition, more people watching period.
The same holds for NASCAR on Prime Video. Counter to the general narrative, more than half of the audience for the five-race Prime Video package was located in the 55+ demographic (1.14 of 2.16 million). The 55+ demographic tuned in at nearly five times the rate of adults 18-34 (233K). But while 55+ viewership declined by 36 percent from the same five race weekends last year, 18-34 increased by the same. This has been largely viewed as a win for the sport.
How can it be a win to trade in more than a third of one’s base for a younger audience that is a fraction of the size? It is pretty simple. Adults 55+ watch a lot of TV, adults 18-34 watch very little. Adults 55+ are easy to reach, adults 18-34 almost impossible. Adults 55+ are accustomed to sitting down on a Sunday to watch a NASCAR race, adults 18-34 are in some cases not accustomed to watching three hours of live sports at all.
Adults 55+ may be more loyal — and may have spent literal decades watching races — but adults 18-34 have yet to form those loyalties in many cases. Not only does it benefit advertisers to reach those younger viewers, it benefits NASCAR by establishing a stronger connection with an audience that it will need in 10, 20, 30 years.
Does all of this add up to ageism? Truth be told, there are probably a lot of ugly conversations that go on in advertising when it comes to which viewers are prioritized. The demographic game fundamentally concerns prioritizing some viewers over others on the basis of attributes over which they have little or no control.
As has been noted on this site multiple times in the past, when NBC began renewal talks with the NBA in September 2001, Variety reported that the network was “particularly concerned” about how the league’s ratings had “skewed over the past few years toward blacks. … The bottom-line problem with this disproportionate percentage of blacks is that most advertisers won’t pay a premium for them, even when they cluster in the hard-to-reach 18-to-34 category.”
It would be shocking to see that kind of concern stated bluntly in Variety — or anywhere else — in 2025, but it is hard to imagine that those conversations no longer happen internally.
Of all the possible attributes, age may be the one that is most socially acceptable to discuss publicly. To begin with, it deals with pragmatic concerns. It is fairly rare for someone to suddenly become an avid viewer of a sport at age 55 or older; the connection must be made at a young age and then sustained over time. There is nothing personal when it comes to prioritizing younger viewers, it is simply business. If the issue was distaste for older viewers, or a desire not to be associated with them, then it would make sense to take umbrage.
Perhaps some of the language used to discuss the age situation contributes to a sense of grievance. When it is said that younger viewers are ‘more valuable,’ it may help to convey that it is because they are 1) so scarce and 2) desperately needed for the future. Without making that clear, one could infer that younger viewers are more valuable for all the reasons older people tend to hear in their regular lives, from physical attributes to cultural relevance. That would be a bit more in the ageist column.
The idea that Prime is taking an “aggressively ageist attitude … toward the oldest and most loyal fans of NASCAR (and the NFL)” does not seem fair. The ability of Prime (and Peacock, which skewed similarly young for its three Nielsen-measured NFL games) to attract younger audiences is a genuine advantage at a time when those viewers are particularly hard to reach.
Now, if the reverse were true and older viewers were hard to reach while younger viewers made up the bulk of the audience, would older viewers be more valuable to the networks? One could be cynical and say there would still be an infatuation with youth, as there so often is, but it seems likely to this writer that the advantages of an older audience — particularly as pertains spending power — would not be so taken for granted.
But in the TV environment that currently exists, having the ability to increase the 18-34 audience by more than a third — even if the raw viewership figure is relatively low — is the kind of impact that linear TV simply has not shown an ability to match.
The critique published in Ourand’s column comes amidst an overarching debate on the performance of sports on streaming platforms vs. linear TV. Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill has been vocally skeptical of Amazon’s advantage among younger viewers, casting it as primarily a result of older viewers tuning out. “It’s easy to look younger when you lose 5 older people for every 1 younger viewer you gain,” he posted after the Coca-Cola 600.
In a recent interview with CNBC, NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps noted that “a pundit” and researcher for one of its rights partners “thought Amazon Prime would do 1.2 million average viewers for the Coke 600.” (The race drew 2.7 million.) “So he missed by just a smidge.” (Given that the only ratings-focused researchers with anything approaching a public profile are Mulvihill and ESPN’s Flora Kelly, it stands to reason that he was talking about the former.)
Mulvihill’s skepticism is somewhat understandable. From the perspective of linear TV, it must be a bit frustrating to see a streamer get glowing articles about its demo numbers when overall viewership declined 16 percent — the kind of consideration that linear broadcasters rarely receive.
Much of that is the advantage of low expectations. In the infancy of sports on streaming, there is no real thought that the overall audience will grow. At least some level of decline is priced in. Thursday Night Football declined 28 percent in year one on Amazon and it took three years before viewership returned to the level the series reached in its final season on Fox and NFL Network in 2021 — but it did return, and with substantially stronger tune-in by the key young demographics.
All things considered, three years is a small price to pay to reshape one’s audience.
And until linear television can attract younger viewers in a similar way, it will be at a rare disadvantage. Consider that after last week’s NASCAR race from Atlanta on TNT Sports — whose Nielsen-measured figures do not include its streaming service Max — one did not hear a peep about the demographics.
