So how many people really watched the Super Bowl?

The National Football League would, again, like you to know it’s a lot more than initially reported.

The official audience number released by Nielsen two days after the game was 113 million viewers, which is the aggregate total for the TV broadcast on Fox, digital viewership and the 882,000 people that watched via Spanish-language Fox Deportes.

Advertisement

That was enough to make Super Bowl LVII the third-most watched U.S. program of all time after 2015’s Super Bowl XLIX (114.4 million viewers on NBC) and the 1969 moon landing (up to 150 million across several channels).

But for the second straight year, the NFL also commissioned a custom Nielsen survey to dig deeper into The Big Game’s audience, particularly people watching in group settings at home and at places like bars and restaurants (known in TV industry lingo as out of home, or OOH).

The results released by the NFL on Feb. 28 show that 136 million people watched the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on Feb. 12 on a field goal with eight seconds left — thrillers are far better for sustaining viewership than blowouts.

Additionally, the survey of nearly 5,200 U.S. households by NORC at the University of Chicago on behalf of Nielsen shows that about 200 million people watched at least a minute of the game — a metric known as “reach” that’s different than the “average minute audience” that’s used by Nielsen’s traditional metrics and produced the 113 million viewer figure.

So what’s the official Super Bowl LVII audience number?

The networks, media and league will go with the 113 million figure because that was measured using the Nielsen measurements that are standard across television. The custom survey is for one event, so there are no other similarly measured programs against which to compare it, and it’s not the sort of thing networks use to set advertising rates.

“Ratings have always mattered more for how they relate to other programming,” said Jon Lewis, who has number-crunched live sports TV viewership at Sports Media Watch since 2006. “Context is what determines how big of a number that is.”

There’s no relative context for other games or programs under these same survey conditions, meaning we don’t have comparable data.

Advertisement

“Absent any context, it’s somewhat meaningless other than to tell us what we already knew,” Lewis said. “This (survey) is not a common currency used by everybody.”

The TV networks don’t make Super Bowl audience guarantees to advertisers like they do most other programming. Everyone knows it’ll be enormous compared to the rest of TV, which is why the rates for 30 seconds of airtime during the game cost an average of $7 million this year and certainly will increase in 2024 when the game is on CBS.

So why spend an undisclosed sum on a survey that doesn’t boost revenue?

It appears to come down to a bit of chest-thumping by the most powerful U.S. television property to remind everyone that the Super Bowl is, by far, the most-watched American television event every year since 1983, but the league also is interested in better understanding how many people watch in group settings — something Nielsen says it has been working to improve.

“The Super Bowl is singular across the television and media landscape not only in its unparalleled viewership, but because it is largely watched in group settings,” Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer, said in a statement announcing the survey results. “With that in mind, additional measurement is needed in order to have a complete picture of the total viewership of this special event, and the results of this custom survey with Nielsen illustrate the true magnitude of the Super Bowl.”

Live sports tend to have more group-setting audiences than other programming, so it’s natural the NFL and other leagues are interested in knowing more about such viewership. And the league believes Nielsen’s normal measurement methods don’t tell the whole story about group viewing of its gem event.

Nielsen estimated that 13 percent of NFL regular-season games are watched out of home in places like bars and restaurants and viewing parties, a figure that’s remained flat over the past two seasons. The 2022 Super Bowl had a 22 percent OOH viewership, or 9 percentage points more than the regular season. That jumped to almost 24 percent this year, per Sports Media Watch.

Advertisement

In the 18-34 age demographic, Nielsen estimated that last year’s Super Bowl OOH viewership was 38 percent, a figure that was 13 percentage points higher than regular-season viewership for that age cohort especially valued by advertisers. An OOH demo breakdown isn’t yet available for the recent Super Bowl.

With the ongoing decline of U.S. cable/satellite households — now down to about 65 million from 100-plus million a few years ago, with an attendant revenue loss — and the proliferation of alternative viewing options, platforms and habits, entities such as the NFL are probing ways to understand just how big their audiences are and where they are as they try to better monetize how fans watch their products.

“(The survey) is more convergence that the Super Bowl has a massive reach,” said Dr. Derek Rucker, a Super Bowl advertising expert and marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It suggests views may occur on other channels, so maybe the number is higher. But that’s just eyeballs, which is only one important factor in all of it.”

So far, nothing has matched traditional linear TV media rights deals for live sports, and such viewership continues to prop up the television industry. Figuring out where people are watching TV, and how many are gathering to watch together, in theory could lead to new or increased revenue streams — something important to the NFL’s goal of becoming a $25 billion business by 2027.

Nielsen has done the deeper-dive survey for at least the past two Super Bowls, and last year’s survey showed a reach of 208 million viewers, or 8 million more than last month’s game.

“Nielsen has measured Super Bowl viewership for over 50 years, giving us a front-row seat to the vast changes in how and where fans watch The Big Game,” Jon Stainer, Nielsen global sports managing director, said in a statement. “We recognize the uniqueness of this media event around group viewing parties, and this additional custom survey helps supplement our audience measurement.”

There also are industry-wide concerns about undercounting audiences, something Nielsen says it has worked to improve (and is rolling out its Nielsen One holistic measurements this year). It began measuring OOH viewership — it’s via audio signals emitted by every broadcast, even at crowded sports bars, and picked up by Nielsen panelists wearing a special device — in 2016 but didn’t formally include them in audience measurements until September 2020.

Advertisement

What that also means is the viewership totals before 2020, particularly for live sports and major events where people watch in groups, are larger than the official numbers. Comparing pre-2020 broadcasts are a bit of apples to oranges in that sense.

With the scale of the Super Bowl audience — a single-network behemoth every year — it’s an enormous cash cow for all involved. Fox estimated before the game last month that it would collect about $600 million in advertising revenue from the broadcast.

Hence, Fox and other networks don’t need a custom survey to continue to cash in on the Super Bowl.

It’s also important to remember that these are scientific extrapolations based on Nielsen’s nationwide panels of 40,000-plus TV households that electronically report what they watch (and provide the age, gender, race, income and other demographic data that the networks and streaming tech giants cannot otherwise replicate).

And “scientific extrapolations” is really just a best guess. That’s been enough for decades in the TV industry, which ultimately uses the viewership data to compare shows and to figure out what to charge advertisers.

“I’d remind everyone that the actual number doesn’t really matter that much,” Lewis said. “The Super Bowl is so far ahead of everything that the exact number doesn’t matter all that much.”

He sees the survey mostly as public relations, even as it’s widely acknowledged within the television industry that the Super Bowl probably has a bigger audience than the official final numbers show.

“The only benefit is PR,” Lewis said. “I can’t envision any real way this number is going to matter. It doesn’t change the calculus. … We already know it’s undercounted.”

Most fans, other than perhaps for some water cooler conversation or trolling/bragging, don’t care much about sports TV ratings. But a sizeable number of them do, and the leagues, sports, networks, tech giants, advertisers and critics obviously take great interest.

Advertisement

“A lot of people care deeply about it,” Lewis said. “There’s whole business constructed on top of it.”

(Photo of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LVII: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)