NFL Boasts About Increased Viewership, But There Seems To Be a Big Catch
NFL ratings decline was so bad in 2017 that the league actually had to refund some advertisers.
A litany of issues ranging the entire political spectrum has torpedoed the league in recent years.
There were those who were deeply angered and disturbed by anthem protests. There were those who felt the league was blackballing Colin Kaepernick. And there were those who felt that the specter of head trauma was too much for their consciences to bear.
Those three stories dominated the headlines, and the NFL paid the price for it.
This season, the most dominant stories were actual football stories. Were the Patriots finished? Just how good could youngsters like Baker Mayfield and Patrick Mahomes be? What would Jon Gruden’s return to football look like? Just how real are the Saints and Rams?
(Probably, very good, very bad and very real, in case you were wondering.)
In response to the turn in narrative, the NFL actually saw some early modest rebounds in its ratings.
Now that the regular season is over, the NFL Media’s Twitter account decided to boast about those increased ratings.
Final viewership numbers from the 2018 NFL regular season pic.twitter.com/OzbT3j0bAx
— NFL Media (@NFLMedia) January 2, 2019
To be completely fair, there are certainly some things worth bragging about.
Having 46 of the 50 most-watched telecasts during the season and having a 5 percent year-over-year viewership bump are nothing to sneeze at.
But the NFL should pump the brakes ever so slightly amid all of their self-congratulatory tweets.
ProFootballTalk, citing executive V.P. for research at FOX Sports Michael Mulvihill, noted that the viewership increase could be attributed to people watching more football, not more people watching football.
Couple more key league-wide NFL viewing stats:
Reach was down -3% this year (184.2m vs. 189.2m)
But the average fan watched one additional game (17.1 games vs. 16.2)
And watched for three more minutes per game (83.5 min vs. 80.4)
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) January 4, 2019
As Mulvihill noted on Twitter, reach for NFL was actually down 3 percent. Five million fewer people actually watched football this year compared to last year (184.2 million in 2018 versus 189.2 million in 2017).
Offsetting that is the fact that the 184.2 million fans who did watch the NFL watched more of it. Each fan watched an additional game and watched longer during the broadcasts as well.
What does this mean for the NFL? It’s certainly not the total win that the NFL made it out to be while boasting about increased viewership, but it’s also hard to paint this necessarily as bad news.
On the one hand, fewer viewers is always a bad thing. It should be noted, as mentioned by both PFT and Mulvihill, that the NFL’s decline in viewers is emblematic of many cable television shows in an increasingly cord-cutting world. Fans staying away and cord cutting are objectively bad things for the league.
On the other hand, as the NFL’s most dominant stories return to actual football stories and not political stories, fan interest is increasing. Any returning fans or fans who’ve stayed strong are being rewarded with better football. More games are watched and for longer, meaning fans are having their interest piqued and retained.
Ultimately, this seems to imply that the NFL has resolved the issues that are within its control with a better on-field product. But the matters out of their direct control seem to have no immediate solution available.
But after the last two years the NFL has had, they will gladly settle for a field goal instead of a touchdown in 2018.
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