The Super Bowl ratings are in and they are a huge disappointment, getting the worst overall ratings in almost 15 years:
CNBC – Super Bowl LV attracted 96.4 million viewers for ViacomCBS on Sunday, the company announced Tuesday, as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9. It’s the lowest watched Super Bowl since 2007, when the Indianapolis Colts played the Chicago Bears, another CBS broadcast. That game attracted 93.1 million viewers, according to Octagon’s media division data provided to CNBC.
Research firm Nielsen, which handles TV viewership data responded on Monday afternoon to inquires about the delay in releasing the information. In a statement to Deadline, a spokesperson said the metrics would include out of home (OOH) numbers. Those numbers represent TVs in places like bars and restaurants and augment viewership data for the NFL.
Even though the overall viewership totals were a disappointment, CBS did tout growth in internet streaming of the Super Bowl. The company said the stream averaged 5.7 million viewers per minute. The game streamed through CBS’s All Access service. Later this year, All Access will change to Paramount+, ViacomCBS’s new streaming service that is designed to take on leaders like Netflix and Disney+.
What we’re looking at is essentially two numbers. The TV ratings for the Superbowl were 91.6 million and the streamers were 5.7 million. And the total of those numbers, 96.4 million, include the OOH numbers described above.
Just to give you some idea of how bad this is, the ratings and viewership for the last 20 Super Bowls are below:
Notice that this Super Bowl got a viewership rating calculation (RTG) of 38.2. That is the worst rating calculation since 1969, according to this chart from Sports Media Watch, when the rating was listed at 36. In fact there’s not a single calculated rating in the 30s since 1971 when the rating was 39.9 for the Colts/Cowboys game.
Just to make these numbers even more disappointing this was during a pandemic, when more people are out of work than they’ve been in a long time. You would think people would be turning on the Super Bowl in record numbers.
The NFL has clearly done a lot of damage to itself with all of this BLM garbage and by embracing Kaepernick and his national anthem protests. And it shows in these terrible ratings.