The much-prognosticated, highly-anticipated NFL Thanksgiving Day viewership figures are unlikely to surface before midweek.
Viewership figures for the NFL Thanksgiving Day games are expected to be reported Wednesday, when the official Nielsen numbers are released. In past years, it has been common for the networks to release fast-national viewership figures ahead of the official release, sometimes as soon as the day after the games — especially in years when the numbers were expected to be record-setting.
But it has become relatively rare to see fast-nationals reported since Nielsen shifted to its “Big Data + Panel” methodology in September. Fast-nationals do not include “Big Data,” making for a fairly significant difference between the preliminary and final figures. For example, FOX reported a fast-national audience of 25.98 million for Game 7 of the World Series last month, but the final national audience was five percent higher at 27.33 million. Lee Corso’s final “College Gameday” averaged 3.5 million in the fast-nationals and 4.0 million in the final tally — an increase of 14%.
While there has always been some variation from the fast nationals to the final nationals, the shift was less pronounced prior to “Big Data + Panel.”
Reporting fast-nationals in the “Big Data” era thus means publicizing viewership figures that will at times be notably lower than the final, official number. Barring any kind of technical issue with the numbers, it would seem that between the choice of publicizing lower viewership figures or waiting nearly a full week for the final numbers, the latter approach won out.
(It is of course also true that fast-nationals may not be reported in years when the viewership is down. But given the expectations and methodological changes, it seems a bit unlikely that was the case this year.)
It should be noted that some fast-national viewership figures have surfaced for other Thanksgiving events. NBC reported fast-national viewership for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (25.4M per Nielsen, 34.3M including Adobe Analytics) and National Dog Show (12.8M per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), and FOX reported the audience for its Michigan State-North Carolina men’s college basketball game (5.49M).
The last time there was a significant difference between the fast-nationals and final nationals was in the first years after Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing. The company began including that data in its final nationals in 2020, but did not do so in the fast-nationals until two years later.
