Patriots’ downfall couldn’t stop Super Bowl ratings slide
Super Bowl LII was a thriller, but its overall viewership? Less so.
For the third consecutive season, Nielsen overnight ratings dropped for the NFL’s premier event, despite the excitement of the Philadelphia Eagles’ 41-33 nail-biter over the defending champion New England Patriots.
Although its audience of 103.4 million puts Super Bowl LII at No. 10 on the all-time mostwatched list of U.S. television, it was beaten out by the 1983 series finale of “M*A*S*H” (106.0 million). Adding in various streaming platforms such as NBCSports.com, NFL.com and the Yahoo Sports app, Sunday night’s game was watched by about 106 million people.
Viewership peaked at 109.2 million from 10-10:25 p.m. as the lead changed hands and New England drove down the field one last time. At 2.02 million live streams (3.1 million concurrent streams at its peak), it delivered the biggest live-streamed Super Bowl ever.
Nonetheless, the broadcast fell short by traditional measurements.
“There is just so much fragmentation going on,” said Paige Beal, chair of Point Park University’s Sports, Arts and Entertainment Management Program in the Rowland School of Business. Second screens and viewing across devices not traditionally measured by Nielsen also help account for lower ratings, she added.
Watching the Super Bowl “is still a destination but nothing like if you want to roll it all the way back to when it was three networks,” she said.
Numbers do not include outof-home viewers — people who watch TV in environments such as offices, airports, hotels, bars and other people’s homes — which might increase the overall totals by several million people. Nielsen will have those statistics available Thursday.
The game delivered a household rating of 43.1 with a 68 share.
Rating is the percentage of the potential audience — how many available TVs are available in a given market — and share estimates how many of those TVs are tuned to certain content during a time period.
Local markets also are measured, with Buffalo’s NBC affiliate topping the list with a 56.4 rating and 78 share.
Nielsen measures social media engagement as well. Between Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, there were 170.7 million social media interactions, with the most tweets (240,000) occurring at 10:20 p.m. at game’s end.
Pittsburgh (54.9/73) was the nation’s top local metered marketa year ago (at 57.9) but was fifth this time. To no one’s surprise, it trailed markets in Philadelphia, Boston and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the game’shost city.
Strictly in terms of final ratings, the 2015 Super Bowl between New England and Seattle on NBC is the all-time best, at 49.7. The Steelers’ top effort was in 2011, when they played in snowy Dallas against the Green Bay Packers (fifth all-time at 47.9, on Fox).
At the very least, Sunday’s gamegave NBC a major showcase to promote its upcoming coverage of the Winter Olympicsin South Korea.
Many predicted viewership would be down for Super Bowl LII, given the NFL’s 10 percent, two-year drop in TV popularity. Competition from non-sports programming, as well as public outcry over NFLplayers taking a stand (or in some cases, a knee) to protest treatment of AfricanAmericans have been cited as possiblereasons.
This game also lacked a presence beyond the Eastern seaboard or a colorful legacy team such as the Steelers or Packers.
There was some expectation that “hate-watching” the Patriots might boost viewership, especially in the Pittsburgh market. Although millions no doubt enjoyed the sight of New England quarterback Tom Brady’s final, desperation pass being batted down in the end zone, apparently a great game and dramatic ending weren’t enough to produce record numbers of viewers.
For networks — and advertisers putting huge amounts of their budgets into this one night — that’s not good news. But like the game itself, never say “never.”
“I see this more of an erosion than a death knell,” Ms. Beal said.