The opening round of the NFL Draft saw a slight dip in viewership from a year ago.
Last Thursday’s opening round of the NFL Draft averaged 13.2 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, NFL Network and several digital platforms — a figure that combines Nielsen, Adobe Analytics and average minute audience data from YouTube, X and TikTok — down slightly from 13.6 million last year, when Shedeur Sanders’ fall down the draft board was the dominant story.
Officially, this year’s audience trails only last year and 2020 — when the Draft was one of the only live sportscasts for weeks — as the largest on record for the NFL Draft. Note that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, only began doing so in 100 percent of markets a year ago, and is mere months into a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will generally skew historical comparisons.
In addition to the standard Nielsen-related caveats, it might go without saying that sports viewership figures traditionally do not include platforms like YouTube, X and TikTok. Those figures are for the Pat McAfee “Draft Spectacular,” which took place for a seventh-straight year. (It is unclear how many of those prior McAfee simulcasts would be included in previous Draft viewership figures.)
It is thus even more difficult than usual to make an apples-to-apples comparison to past years. For example, the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft averaged 12.4 million viewers without out-of-home viewing, “Big Data,” social media metrics or broadcast television simulcasts. It is a borderline lock that all things being equal, viewership would have been higher then than now.
The same could be said of other years — like 2018 (11.2M) or 2019 (11.1M) — that did not benefit from the methodological changes and multi-platform presentations that have helped fuel sports viewership in recent years.
A breakdown of Draft viewership by network and platform was not immediately available.
