A lackluster Super Bowl still delivered the second-best audience on record, albeit with the benefit of recent changes to how that audience is measured.
Super Bowl LX between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots averaged 124.9 million viewers across NBC, Telemundo, Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL+, according to a press release issued by the network on Tuesday evening. That number is good for the second most-watched Super Bowl in history behind only last year’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, which averaged 127.7 million viewers across Fox’s platforms.
Not coincidentally, last year’s Super Bowl was the first in which Nielsen expanded its out-of-home viewing measurements to cover the entirety of the United States, boosting the final audience figure compared to prior years. This year’s Super Bowl was the first to include the expanded out-of-home measurements in addition to Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel methodology, which implements data gathered from smart TVs into its sample. Both changes have served to increase viewership for live sports compared to the old methods. So, despite the last two Super Bowls failing to deliver compelling action on the field, they’ll go down as the two most-watched in history.
Viewership for Super Bowl LX peaked in the second quarter at 137.8 million viewers, marking the highest peak audience in U.S. television history by barely edging out the peak audience of last year’s Super Bowl, 137.7 million viewers.
Bad Bunny’s halftime show averaged 128.2 million viewers, which means about 9.5 million viewers tuned out between the second-quarter peak and halftime. Last year, about 4.2 million viewers tuned out between its second-quarter peak and Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, which averaged 133.5 million viewers. That discrepancy is notable given the effort by conservative activist group Turning Point USA to counter-program Bad Bunny’s performance.
Telemundo chipped in an audience of 3.3 million viewers for NBC, which makes it the most-watched Super Bowl in history for a Spanish-language network in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, viewership on Telemundo peaked at 4.8 million viewers during Bad Bunny’s halftime performance.
It’s fair to say, all things being equal, Super Bowl LX was almost certainly not the second most-watched Super Bowl in history. These record-setting audience figures are largely a function of Nielsen’s new methodologies which are able to better capture viewers watching in non-traditional settings like bars and restaurants.
Regardless, it’s clear that there is still no mass viewership draw in the United States quite like the Super Bowl. Even the College Football Playoff National Championship, the title game for the second most-popular sport in the country, only drew 30 million viewers (its second-best audience in the CFP era). Nothing comes close to the numbers the NFL is able to pull, and that’s clear no matter how viewership measurements change from year to year.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.