Posted on 10/04/2016 10:20:02 AM PDT by 11th_VA
Research conducted on behalf of SportsBusiness Daily has found unprecedented double-digit audience declines for NFL games so far this season.
According to research firm CivicScience, NBC’s Sunday Night Football — the highest rated prime-time program for the last five years — has seen its average audience drop 10 percent so far this year after four games.
Viewership of the NFL’s widely dispersed Thursday night games has dropped 15 percent. And ESPN’s Monday Night Football is down 19 percent.
It’s not fringe science — culling Nielsen data, Sports Media Watch has the NFL’s ratings pretty much down across the board through the first four weeks of the regular season.
It’s hard to elicit panic from media executives just a quarter of the way through the NFL regular season, but the implications could be huge. Popularity of NFL programming has grown quickly as most other shows have seen their audience succumb to new consumption patterns. And the NFL now operates with impunity.
"You never like seeing a competitor getting a part of what you do, but such is the NFL,” CBS Corp. chief executive Moonves recently lamented to investors after the league made CBS share its Thursday night games with NBC and Twitter. “They’re the 800-pound gorilla, and when the NFL says 'jump,' you say, 'yes sir.’"
But the possible ramifications go beyond the NFL.
Not only did NBCU experience double-digit ratings declines for the Rio Olympics, Major League Baseball and NASCAR have all seen significant ratings drops, too. And the NCAA men’s basketball championship game experienced record low viewership.
“All these sports go through cycles,” said Artie Bulgrin, ESPN’s senior VP of global research and analytics, said to SportsBusiness Daily. “It’s impossible to suggest that there’s anything going wrong here, particularly in light of the fact that we are in a really odd year in terms of the protracted presidential race, which has captured the attention of Americans going back a year now. Plus, it’s an Olympic year, which clearly had an impact during the summer.”
For his part, Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ senior vice president of programming and research, says sports ratings have dropped in previous presidential election cycles. Notably, cable news networks are experiencing double-digit ratings increases.
“I would really start with the election — I don’t think you have to look much deeper than that,” Mulvihill said. “Cable news has been up so much all year, going back to the earliest primary debates. So much of a share of attention has gone to the campaign, it seems like it has affected everything else.”
I’m a Lions fan, our season is already over.
Haven’t seen a game yet this season. Not likely to either.
I agree with you. I think there’s also a trend of people just getting bored with many forms of commercialized entertainment. That’s why ratings are down across the board — not just in the NFL.
They’d better hope they can make enough money from politically correct pajama-boy types. Some of us deplorable red meat types have moved on and probably won’t be back. I left mostly because I despise their politics and attack on my Christian values (which started before this Kapernick stuff), but now that I’m gone I don’t miss it. There is a sense of great freedom once a poor habit is broken. I shudder to think of all the time, money, and mental energy I have wasted on the NFL since I attended my first game (Cowboys @ Cardinals) in 1971.
I must admit I enjoyed watching the final day of the baseball season, a lot of games with playoff implications going on at the same time. Baseball will always be there. Nothing beats playoff baseball, where every pitch matters.
Thanks demkicker—this gets my vote for the post of the year!
:) I grew up just outside Leicester City....we still have a big smile from last season.
I have stopped watching altogether. It is like the BLM people have taken over the NFL.
The NFL is going to learn that fans don’t boycott the NFL. They dump it for good. Once they find something else to do on Sunday afternoons, they never come back.
I guess. You guys rocked last year... and then Manchester United ruined this season, or at least temporarily.
LOL. Reminds me of an old baseball quote from a player or manager explaining why he didn’t want to play for the Cleveland Indians: “In Cleveland, pennant fever is a 48 hour virus.”
I hear some of the guys around town talk about that crap its like crack to them
Basketball starts soon enough.
I was telling my wife that we did not have a lot of time left to jump on the Red Sox wagon.
Nice to see some overdue respect for soccer. For a long time, many FReepers have been deriding soccer as a game for European Nancy boys.
MLS consists of two 45-min. halves, a short half-time break, no timeouts, and a reasonable amount of tacked-on stoppage time, and you’re outta there. NFL? A 1-hr. game that takes upwards of four hours to play, what with commercials, never-ending time-outs, watching replays to be sure the bonehead refs got the call right, half-times that often rival any Barnum & Bailey show I ever saw, and ticket prices that make your face blanch.
Which one do you suppose I’ve chosen?
A FReeper noted that the NFL is a perfect vehicle for controlling the thoughts and behaviors of white males.
It is a tool of the left to cow me into submission.
I refuse to go quietly into that goodnight.
“I grew up just outside Leicester City....”
Yeah, bless their little hearts!
I’m tired of millionare Gangstas.
Cut out the Hip Hop and the Rap crap and get back to football and the colorblind brotherhood ways of the past.
Now, it’s just for ‘The Brothers’.
It destroyed the NBA and now the NFL.
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