Airing for free on the biggest media platform in the world, the audience for the NFL’s YouTube debut was not too different than a top-level game on Amazon.
Friday’s Chiefs-Chargers NFL International Series game from Brazil averaged a Nielsen-measured audience of 16.2 million viewers on YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing company said Monday. YouTube also estimated a global audience of 1.1 million, bringing the total audience to 17.3 million. (Update 9/12: YouTube now says that the audience of 16.2 million was an undercount due to an “internal issue” and the game actually averaged 18.5 million in the United States and 19.2 million globally.)
Keep in mind the YouTube viewership figure was disputed by officials at the other networks even before the game kicked off Friday night. ESPN researcher Flora Kelly wrote on social media that the Nielsen was using a “custom methodology” for the game that was not accredited by the Media Research Council, meaning that it will not be a “fair comp” to the other networks.
In addition, any viewership comparisons this NFL season will be apples-to-oranges due to the new Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” metric that became the official measurement currency last week. Between the addition of “Big Data” and Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing, all viewership figures this year will have a built-in advantage in comparisons to a year ago, much less five or ten years ago.
With those caveats in mind, the YouTube audience for Chargers-Chiefs ranks ahead of last year’s Packers-Eagles Brazil game on Peacock, which drew 14.2 million viewers. It is on par with last year’s Giants-Cowboys Thursday Night Football game on Amazon’s Prime Video, which was the streamer’s most-watched game at the time (surpassed weeks later by Packers-Lions at 17.3 million). But as one might expect, it was no match for the two Christmas Day NFL games on Netflix (24 million each) or the two Wild Card playoff games on streaming, Steelers-Ravens on Prime Video last January (22.1M) or Dolphins-Chiefs on Peacock two years ago (22.9M).
It was not immediately clear if the YouTube audience included local simulcast coverage on over-the-air affiliates, figures that are always included in the other streaming numbers.
Compared to linear games, the YouTube audience remains lower than what one would generally expect for a primetime NFL game in Week 1 of the season. Figures for this year’s NFL Kickoff Game had yet to be reported as of Monday morning, but last year’s Kickoff Game averaged more than 29 million across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, last year’s first Sunday and Monday night games averaged in the neighborhood of 20 million.
