The Super Bowl set another viewership record, though whether more viewers were actually watching than last year is another story.
Sunday’s Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl 59 averaged a combined 41.7 rating and 127.7 million viewers across FOX, Tubi, Telemundo and Fox Deportes, surpassing Chiefs-49ers on CBS, Nickelodeon and Univision last year (123.7M) to rank as the largest Nielsen-estimated audience on record.
Philadelphia’s easy win, in which they led 34-0 and 40-6 in the second half, peaked with 137.7 million in the 8 PM ET quarter-hour. In a rarity, viewership actually dipped at halftime, but the audience of 133.5 million for Kendrick Lamar’s performance was a new record for the halftime show.
The record audience follows Nielsen’s announcement last week that it has expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover all of the country, up from two-thirds previously.
While viewership increased 3% from last year’s previous record, the household rating declined 4% from last year’s 43.5. The gap between the household rating and viewership is an indication that Nielsen’s expansion of out-of-home viewing was a determining factor in this year’s audience surpassing last year. It is a likely that all things being equal, there were more viewers watching last year’s overtime thriller.
Out-of-home viewing by definition is not included in household ratings, making it arguably the only apples-to-apples gauge of viewing over years. This year’s game still performed well by that metric, as the 41.7 is the second-highest for the Super Bowl in five years (2020 Chiefs-49ers: 42.0), surpassing the previous Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl on FOX two years ago (40.7), to say nothing of the COVID-era editions in 2021 (Buccaneers-Chiefs: 38.4) and 2022 (Rams-Bengals: 37.9).
Go back further, and this year’s Super Bowl trails several prior games in the past decade — the Eagles’ prior Super Bowl win over the Patriots on NBC in 2018 (43.1), Patriots-Falcons on FOX in 2017 (45.3), Broncos-Panthers on CBS in 2016 (46.6) and Patriots-Seahawks on NBC in 2015 (47.5), which still ranks as the highest rated Super Bowl since 1986.
Had out-of-home viewing been measured to the extent that it is today — or even at all — in those years, it is likely that several of those games would have averaged audiences in excess of this year’s game. The household rating for Patriots-Seahawks was 14% higher than this year; assume a proportional lift in viewership and the audience for that game would approach 150 million.
Out-of-home viewing affects all television properties, but it is worth noting that only the NFL is regularly setting all-time records. The out-of-home era has not guaranteed record viewership for the NBA Finals, World Series or college football national championship — far from it. The NFL in this era has a unique strength among television properties that makes its viewership figures culturally significant in a way that other leagues cannot begin to approach. Thus, claims such as ‘most-watched [x]’ require a bit more scrutiny than the typical five or even ten-year high.
Super Bowl viewership is often used as a gauge for how the public feels about pop stars, politicians, advertising, the culture as a whole — so it worth examining whether a viewership record was set because of viewer habits or because of changes in how those habits were measured.
The primary English-language broadcast on FOX and Tubi averaged a 40.9 and 125.85 million, down 3% in ratings but up 5% in viewership from last year’s main broadcast on CBS (42.1, 120.25M).
As previously noted, viewership benefited from Fox streaming the game in 4K on its free streaming service Tubi — which averaged 13.6 million viewers, part of an overall streaming audience of 14.5 million. Fox said Tuesday that the Tubi audience increased 27% from last year, when CBS streamed coverage on its paid subscription service Paramount+. (Fox estimates of Tubi’s viewership are based on first party data and Adobe Analytics.)
The difference between the Fox and CBS streaming audiences — about three million if one estimates 10.6 million for Paramount+ a year ago (a figure that was never publicized) — would not fully account for this year’s increase.
In addition to English-language audience on FOX and Tubi, the Super Bowl averaged 1.87 million viewers on Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Fox Deportes — down from last year on Univision.
