Running Numbers: Translating The Insane NFL TV Viewership Into “Unique Views”

Posted by Dan Levy.

We’ve all read release after release after release about just how good the ratings were for the NFL this season. Just how good, you ask? Well, according to CBS:

Through 17 weeks of the 2010 regular season (September 9, 2010-January 2, 2011), THE NFL ON CBS regular-season games were seen by an estimated 164.2 million viewers, 10% higher than NBC’s 149.8 million viewers, 1% higher than FOX’s 162.1 million viewers and 48% higher than ESPN’s 110.9 million.

Those cumulative numbers were based on total viewers (P2+) who watched at least six minutes of NFL game coverage. Add in record numbers for the playoffs (take it away, FOX):

Ratings climbed to astonishing levels as the [NFC Championship] game progressed, peaking at a 31.5/53 rating and 59.5 million viewers from 5:30 – 6:00 PM ET as the Packers punched their first ticket to a Super Bowl in 13 years. FOX Sports estimates that 80.3 million Americans saw at least part of Sunday’s game.

Let’s not forget NBC winning every Sunday night (and two weeknights) of the season, en route to record ratings:

SNF was the No. 1 show all 18 nights this season vs. its competition (16 Sundays, one Tuesday and one Thursday), averaging 21.8 million viewers (based on most current Nielsen figures), a gain of 12 percent from last year (19.4 million) and the best viewership for the NFL’s premier primetime broadcast package in 14 years.

We can’t leave out ESPN, which broke countless cable ratings this year, too:

The 41st season of Monday Night Football was the highest-rated and most-viewed season since ESPN assumed sports television’s signature series in 2006. For the fifth straight year, MNF was again the most-watched series on cable television, drawing the calendar year’s 16 biggest cable household audiences, and the top 12 among viewers.

The numbers are staggering. But what if we looked at them from an internet construct?  (Hang on, these numbers are about to get pretty fuzzy.)

NFL Ratings as Pageviews

Pardon the Alice in Wonderlandish nature of this experiment, but I thought it’d be fun to look at the NFL ratings from a pageview perspective. The CBS numbers, above, are the best representation of an overall number of viewers for the NFL regular season, with Fox’s 80-million viewer estimation representing a strong playoff number. The Super Bowl had a reported 162,900,000 viewers for at least part of the game. So, looking at those numbers, it stands to reason that somewhere between 164 and, say, 200 million people watched some part of an NFL game this year.

In most cases, sports fans are being counted four and five times a week, contributing to the overall ratings for FOX, CBS, NBC, ESPN and NFLN in any given week. So, despite the ratings boasting, you can’t just add up the total from each network to get a definitive total of “unique viewers.” More than likely, the highest number of unique viewers is also the total number.

But what about the pageviews? If you have a blog that does one million monthly unique pageviews, that doesn’t mean you have one million readers who only show up once a month.

Let’s say you had a blog with four or five new posts a week; three on Sunday, one on Monday and one on the occasional Thursday. Let’s say that each of those posts averaged 16.22 million unique pageviews, it might only be that number of unique viewers, but you’d collect…what…81 million pageviews from those viewers? Every week.

Based on press releases during/after the season, here’s a look at the total number of “unique views” for each network. The math is simple: I took the average number of viewers per week and multiplied it by the number of weeks each network had games.

Regular Season

CBS Regular Season: 18.747 million average x 17 weeks = 318,699,000
FOX Regular Season: 20.1 million average x 17 weeks = 341,700,000
NBC Regular Season: 21.8 million average x 18 games = 392,400,000
ESPN Regular Season: 14.657 million average x 17 games = 249,169,000
NFL Network 5.7 million average x 8 games = 45,600,000

Please note that those numbers are actually LOW, considering we only accounted for 17 weeks for both CBS and FOX, which doesn’t factor in any double-header weeks where the networks had games on against each other in one or more timeslots. Also note that these regular season numbers don’t factor in DirecTV Sunday Ticket or NFL RedZone channels.

Post Season

CBS Playoffs (including AFC title game): 40.291 million average x 4 games = 161,164,000
FOX Playoffs (including NFC title game): 38.55 million average x 4 games = 154,200,000
NBC Playoffs: 30.6 million average x 2 games = 61,200,000

Super Bowl (FOX) = 162,900,000

And THOSE numbers aren’t counting the Pro Bowl, which had a record 13.4 million viewers in prime time on FOX.

The Total

Again, the math is totally fuzzy and it’s likely that the rating for the Super Bowl is nearly the ceiling of total unique viewers to the NFL’s product this year. But if you’re looking at total NFL in-game, non-exhibition pageviews through the regular season and playoffs, you’re looking at…

1,887,032,000

Yes, that’s almost 1.89 BILLION unique views from September through early February. The NFL would make one helluva blog.

Posted on February 8, 2011 at 4:18PM

This Post tags: CBS, ESPN, Football, FOX, NBC, NFL, NFLN, Running Numbers

 

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