For an event as consistently strong as March Madness, viewership simply rising in line with Nielsen’s methodological changes — or even slightly behind that pace — equals a slew of new records.
Through Sunday’s second round, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was averaging a combined 10.1 million viewers per window across CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV — the highest average on record at this point of the event and an increase of 7% over last year. Between this year and last, Nielsen shifted to a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. The 7% increase is within the margin that could be explained entirely by that change.
In addition to being the first since Nielsen rolled out “Big Data + Panel,” this year’s NCAA Tournament is only the sixth since Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates, and the second since it expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states. Those changes will skew comparisons to all prior years, but especially those prior to 2020.
Individual game viewership was not immediately available, but the most-watched window thus far was Sunday’s early primetime slot at 19.7 million across CBS, TBS and TNT — up 29% from last year and officially the largest audience ever for any NCAA Tournament window during the first week of play. The window featured St. John’s beating Kansas at the buzzer on CBS, Iowa upsetting Florida on TBS, and a competitive game between Tennessee and Virginia on TNT.
The year-over-year increase is well beyond the range that would be explained by methodology, though it is almost certain that viewership would trail some other recent years — in particular 2017, when the same window grossed 18.55 million without aid of out-of-home viewing — all things being equal.
Typically, the pre-“60 Minutes” CBS game — St. John’s-Kansas this year — is the most-watched of the opening weekend, and one imagines that was the case again given the size of the combined audience.
The full second round of the tournament averaged a combined 11.0 million viewers per window, up 7% from last year and the highest since 9.6 million in 1993. (It is almost certain that viewership would have been higher in 1993, and probably no shortage of subsequent years, had out-of-home viewing been tracked then.)
The first round finished as officially the most-watched on record with 9.5 million viewers per window.
