A NEW CAMPAIGN
NFL ratings should score post-prez fight: analyst
As Madison Avenue tunes into the NFL season opener Thursday night to see if the country’s No. 1 sport can regain its ratings mojo, one prominent media analyst on Wednesday offered a bullish report.
No election, no problem, said Michael Nathanson, who said the much-chewedover 8 percent slide in the NFL’s TV ratings last year was caused in large part by the nasty presidential election.
Without such a national distraction, Nathanson, of MoffettNathanson, is forecasting ratings of NBC’s Sunday Night Football will increase 5 percent and that ESPN’s Monday Night Football will see its TV viewership rise by 11 percent.
“It seems obvious that the news cycle ahead of last year’s election had a negative impact on the NFL’s ratings,” he said.
Nathanson drives home his election-campaign theory by pointing out that pre-election ratings were down 12 percent compared with the previous season — while post-election viewership fell just 5 percent.
Nathanson added that NFL ratings were also hurt by poor matchups, something he said is not as much of a challenge this year.
“It does look like the NFL has constructed a better primetime schedule this year,” he said, noting the NFL game power rankings were up solidly this season over last year.
The slide in NFL ratings was the talk of the media world — and beyond — last year. It came after years of steady growth.
The league attracted $3.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2016 and draws the most consistent TV audience of young male adults.
The possibility that the NFL’s grip on that demographic was loosening made ad execs nervous.
There were scores of stories about the ratings slide, with everything from exSan Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the pre-game national anthem to the threat of concussions and the poor off-field behavior of some players being blamed for the ratings tumble.
The NFL’s TV partners — ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS — depend on football to draw in viewers.
The NFL games and the “shoulder” programming leading into them accounted for 59 percent of Fox’s gross ratings points during the 2016 season, 28 percent at NBC, 26 percent at ESPN and 26 percent at CBS.
“Why do we care so much about the NFL?” Nathanson asked. “That’s where the money is.”
The analyst also considered online fan interest, using Nielsen’s Web site rankings to test the strength of each team’s fan base.
Not surprisingly, the greater loyalty exhibited by each team’s fan base, the greater the ratings.
These two ratings factors offer such an improvement over the pregame point spread — once considered an infallible measure of fan interest — that Nathanson no longer uses that calculation to predict NFL viewership.