Super Bowl 43: The Most-Viewed U.S. TV Event Ever

[Taur]

After further review.....


The Most-Viewed U.S. TV Event Ever - TV Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

The preliminary ratings for the Super Bowl were just that — preliminary.

Newly revised ratings from Nielsen Media Research show that Sunday’s game made ratings history, earning an average of 98.7 million viewers, or 1.2 million more than the previous Super Bowl record set just last year. The figure refers to the number of people who were watching on average during the game. The preliminary ratings, released on Monday, suggested that this year’s Super Bowl came in second behind last year’s match-up.

The final ratings, released Tuesday by Nielsen, estimated that 151.6 million viewers watched some portion of the game, making it the most-viewed television program of all time in the United States. Or at least the most-sampled show: to count as one of the 151.6 million, a viewer had to tune in for six minutes or more.

The average audience of 98.7 million viewers makes Super Bowl XLIII the second most-watched TV broadcast in history, behind the 1983 series finale of “M*A*S*H.” Fewer people watched a portion of that program (122 million) than sampled the Super Bowl, but more were watching at any given time. Of course, the U.S. population has grown substantially in the past 26 years.

I guess Tony from PTI is going to have to rethink his statement about Pittsburgh's drawing power.

[JonInMiddleGA]

It appears that the total body count was higher but the rating (which is simply the percentage of the population that watched) may actually have been lower.
Population growth, in case that doesn't make sense to anybody at first blush.

edit to add: Also worth noting is that this was an unusual SB in that the ratings peaked in the 4th quarter as opposed to early in the game. Last prelims I saw yesterday showed a pretty sizable difference for the end of the game actually, more than 10% over the 1st quarter. That made winners out of among others GoDaddy, who paid significantly less for their late game ads & won their gamble on still getting a good audience for the spot.

[Taur]

Does anyone know how Nielson tracks people watching shows via the internet?

I was just curious as how NBC's live streaming went over this year.

[JonInMiddleGA]

{scratches head}

I didn't know the SB was on the internet in the U.S.

At any rate, here's a rather long & somewhat vague description of how this was to be integrated sometime last year. I can only guess that it happened roughly as described since I've seen references to the subsequent data in a couple of pieces from around November '08.

[wade moore]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

{scratches head}

I didn't know the SB was on the internet in the U.S.

[Tim Tellean]

SB 43 was the most watched SB of all-time but MASH finale is still the all-time most watched program with 122 million viewers.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Tim Tellean

SB 43 was the most watched SB of all-time but MASH finale is still the all-time most watched program with 122 million viewers.

Yeah, it's all in what number you look at I guess.

Average audience across the entire program is still MASH, largest cume (at least 6 mins of viewing) is now this SB courtesy of some rather significant population growth during the 26 years in between.

Oddly enough, since it usually doesn't work out this way, I seem to have been a pretty normal viewer for this one. Turned the game on somewhere in Q2 and then stuck around for most of the rest.

[DaddyTorgo]

i don't really raise an eyebrow at these statistics anymore for anything because there's so many ways to slice it to arrive at that conclusion that lots of things can, and there's also more and more people so it's pretty "meh". I'd be more worried if they said it wasn't frankly.