The Ratings Game

Last weekend’s final round of the PGA TOUR 3M Open from Minneapolis averaged a 2.1 rating and 3.71 million viewers on CBS, marking the largest audience on record for the event (debuted in 2019). Read more

Tuesday’s Fever-Storm WNBA regular season game averaged 1.4 million viewers on ESPN, trailing only Fever-Aces earlier in the month (1.55M) as the most-watched WNBA game on cable or streaming this season.

Last week’s ESPY Awards averaged a 1.4 rating and 2.6 million viewers on ABC, trailing only an audience of 2.64 million two years ago — when coverage was delayed due to a special report — as the largest audience for the event since 2019 (3.87M). Read more

The fourth week of the BIG3 basketball season averaged a 0.3 rating and 596,000 viewers on CBS last weekend, flat and up 1% respectively from last year (0.3, 588K), a figure that is within the margin that can be explained by Nielsen methodological changes. Read more

Final round coverage of the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament averaged 1.5 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (0.9 rating, 1.50M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — up 49% from last year (1.0M) and the highest for the event since 2004 (1.6M). Read more

Final round coverage of the Scottish Open golf tournament averaged a 1.2 rating and 1.944 million viewers on CBS last Sunday, virtually even with the live portion of last year’s final round, which ended about an hour earlier than scheduled due to inclement weather (1.943M). (Compared to last year’s full window, which included 45 minutes of replay coverage, viewership increased 16% from 1.67 million.) Read more

Last weekend’s rain-delayed NASCAR Cup Series race from Atlanta averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.47 million viewers on TNT Sports, per the official Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology, and a 0.9 and 1.57 million per the old ‘panel-only’ metric NASCAR is now publicizing — both down from last year’s race at the track, which was not as severely delayed (1.61M). Read more