Why Did Super Bowl Ratings Collapse?

It was an ominous sign for the Super Bowl when Nielsen and CBS declined to boast about, or even release, the ratings the next day. It turns out that 91.629 million watched the game on the broadcast network. Perhaps CBS spent Monday trying to find a way to beef up those numbers. Eventually it announced that another 5.7 million viewed the show on digital and mobile properties, for a total viewership of 96.4 million.

That’s a 38.2 household rating, Ratings-wise, it was the worst performance for the Super Bowl since, egad, 1969, when the rating was 36.0. Remember 1969? I don’t, not really. I started watching the Super Bowl in 1975 and the level of marketing hype attached to it, compared with today, is like comparing Scranton to Tokyo. It was played in the afternoon. It was for football fans, not a semi-official national holiday and internationally promoted event. In 1975, some 56 million Americans (out of 219 million) watched the game.

This week, the viewership average (how many people watching at a given moment) was off 10 percent from last year and 20 percent from the recent high-water mark, the thrilling contest between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks in 2015. The last time broadcast-TV viewership was this low was way back in 2006, when the Steelers beat the Seahawks, 90.7 million tuned in, and the U.S. population was 10 percent smaller than it is today.

You might have expected that lockdowns, restaurant and bar closings, and a general unease with crowds might have led more people to watch the game at home this year than usual. But I can think of a few things that might be turning off viewers.

1. Politics. The players are wearing slogans on their helmets and shoes. Some of these slogans are associated with controversial movements such as Black Lives Matter. Efforts by the owners to keep politics out of the NFL a couple of years ago have collapsed. Sports fans who thought of the field of play as a politics-free zone can no longer think that way, and one of the game’s premier players, Drew Brees, felt compelled to apologize for making patriotic statements of the kind no one considered offensive until this past year.
2. Lack of crowd excitement. The games are much less thrilling when there is little to no crowd noise coming from mostly-empty stadiums. The whole season was dispiriting to watch for this reason. The piped-in crowd noise was sad, like a laugh track on a sitcom.
3. Relatively obscure halftime act. The Weeknd, this year’s headliner, hardly enjoys the name recognition of previous acts such as Beyoncé, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, or U2.
4. Tom Brady fatigue. Really? This guy again?
5. Small markets. Though Brady is still hugely popular with the large New England media market, which effectively gave the game three home media markets, both Tampa (No. 13) and Kansas City (No. 34) are smaller markets.
6. The rise of streaming services. Rival TV networks traditionally don’t air much competition for the Super Bowl, but there is always something on Netflix, which saw a 20 percent bump in domestic subscribers in the last twelve months or so, and Disney+ went from zero to 87 million global subscribers since launch in November 2019.
7. A bad game. Tampa Bay jumped out to an early lead and spent most of the game widening the gap.

Assessing the relative import of all of these factors is no doubt being hotly debated by insiders. But then again, none of this seems to affect the bottom line: Super Bowl ad rates go up nearly every year regardless. This year a 30-second ad cost $5.5 to $5.6 million. As recently as 2013, ads went for a comparatively paltry $3.8 million. Next year, advertisers will be eager to be part of a post-pandemic mood, and rates will jump again.