The numbers are in for NASCAR’s five-race stretch on Amazon’s Prime Video, and they look encouraging overall.
According to a report by Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, Prime Video averaged 2.16 million viewers across its five NASCAR Cup Series races in Charlotte, Nashville, Michigan, Mexico City, and Pocono. That’s down about 15% from last year’s comparable windows on Fox, FS1, and USA, but a decline was to be expected.
When the NFL’s Thursday Night Football made the jump from Fox and NFL Network to Prime Video in 2023, viewership decreased by 26% (12.9 million viewers to 9.58 million viewers). By that standard, NASCAR more than beat the spread.
And given that Prime Video attracted a substantially younger audience to NASCAR’s races, it is a tradeoff that the racing circuit seems willing to make. Per Karp, Prime Video’s races had a median age of 56.1, over seven years younger than the median age of NASCAR’s linear television broadcasts this season (62.8 on Fox and FS1). Viewership in the 18-34 demographic is also up 36% versus the same set of races on linear television last year.
NASCAR CEO Steve Phelps seems satisfied with the change. In an interview with CNBC Sport earlier this week, Phelps noted the “overwhelmingly positive” fan reaction to the Prime Video coverage. He also called out one particular network executive, without naming names, for suggesting that audiences on Prime Video would be substantially diminished from the comparable linear television figures.
“There were lots of people who doubted that the numbers would be as good as they are,” Phelps began. “I mean, there’s a pundit who thought the numbers, and I won’t say who it is because it’s a current partner, their research person thought Amazon Prime would do 1.2 million average viewers for the Coke 600.”
“It was over 2 million,” CNBC’s Brian Sullivan said.
“2.7,” Phelps replied. “So, he missed by just a smidge.”
To go back to the Thursday Night Football comparison, Year 1 was the most difficult for the NFL. However, Years 2 and 3 saw a substantial increase in the number of viewers tuning in for games, to the point where Thursday Night Football audiences are now well in line with the linear TV audiences of 2022. Phelps believes that NASCAR will follow a similar trajectory.
“If you look at what [Prime Video] did with the NFL, Year 1 was good, Year 2 was better, Year 3 was terrific. And the numbers grew significantly. And I think there’s going to be that [for NASCAR] as well. Additionally, as we knew it would be, like the NFL, the average age of the viewer dropped…that’s a good thing for us.”
NASCAR, of course, had the added benefit of making the transition to streaming exclusives several years after the NFL made the jump. Prime Video is a more ubiquitous streamer now than it was in 2023. Still, the data is encouraging.
Phelps knew going into NASCAR’s new media rights deals that, on some level, they’d be sacrificing reach for revenue. Broadcast television will still give NASCAR its largest reach, but it seems that the sacrifice of moving some races to a platform like Prime Video wasn’t as significant as expected. That bodes well for the sport’s future as it continues to court younger fans.