For the second straight year, the Super Bowl tacked on an extra 12 million viewers via Nielsen’s out-of-home metric.
Last Sunday’s Super Bowl 53 on CBS had an out-of-home audience of 12 million viewers, the same as last year, bringing the total audience for the game up to an estimated 112.7 million. Patriots-Rams had 98.2 million viewers on CBS alone and 100.7 million across all in-home platforms.
The total Nielsen-reported audience — across CBS TV, CBS Digital, ESPN Deportes, NFL Digital and Verizon, on linear television and streaming platforms, both in-home and out of home — still marks a 5% decline from last year on NBC (118.2M). It also trails the across-all-platforms audience in 2017 (113.69M), 2016 (113.73M), 2015 (115.8M) and 2014 (113.3M), which did not include out-of-home viewing.
Nielsen did not begin measuring out-of-home data until 2016, and last year’s Super Bowl was the first to use the metric. As a result, it is impossible to know where Sunday’s game truly ranks historically.
As one would expect, the Super Bowl attracts a significantly larger out-of-home audience than other sporting events. Last month’s College Football Playoff National Championship added 1.3 million in out-of-home viewing, as a comparison.
The full list of Super Bowl ratings and viewership is available here.
[Numbers from CBS Sports PR]
