Viewership milestones are nothing new for the Kentucky Derby, but in the current era of measurement, it is setting those marks by ever-greater lengths.
Saturday’s race segment of the Kentucky Derby averaged a combined 19.6 million viewers across Nielsen preliminary data and Adobe Analytics, marking the largest audience for the event in the Nielsen people meter era (1989-present), surpassing the longtime record-holder of 18.5 million in 1989. Golden Tempo’s win, which peaked with 24.4 million in the 7 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 11% from last year (17.7M).
The Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience was 1.3 million, up 36% from last year and a record for a horse racing event on NBC Sports. That would put the Nielsen-measured audience around 18.3 million, still the highest since the 1989 race.
Note that this year’s Derby was the only seventh since Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates, the second since it began doing so in 100% of markets, and the first since it rolled out a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. Those changes will generally skew comparisons to past years, particularly before the out-of-home era began in 2020.
The Derby has now delivered its largest audience since 1989 in three consecutive years, a period that coincides with the above methodological changes. Like the NFL and NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the Kentucky Derby may be one of those events that will regularly set records simply by rising in line with changes in Nielsen methodology.
While it has always ranked among the most-watched events in sports, Derby viewership is now surpassed only by football, the Olympics, and rare, one-off events like Game 7 of last year’s World Series. This year’s audience surpassed the NCAA men’s basketball national championship, which was officially the most-watched in seven years (18.3M).
Keep in mind that the “race portion” of the Derby was only 55 minutes (6:32-7:27 PM ET), while most other sporting events have to sustain an audience over a longer period of time. (The recent final round of the Masters sustained an audience of nearly 14 million over 5+ hours.)
In addition to the Derby itself, NBC averaged 2.4 million for Friday’s Kentucky Oaks, which aired in primetime on broadcast television after previously taking place in the afternoon on cable. Unsurprisingly, that was by a wide margin the largest audience for the event.
