NEW YORK—America’s biggest sporting event is once again raising big questions about the accuracy of audience measurement tools, with a new custom study from Nielsen that was commissioned by the National Football League estimating that Super Bowl XLVIII was watched by 210 million people, about two thirds of the population.
Like last year’s custom study, that number is much higher than previously reported data on Super Bowl viewing, including data initially supplied by Nielsen itself.
As previously reported, CBS Sports cited Nielsen data showing that its coverage of Super Bowl LVIII, which featured the Kansas City Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers, delivered record viewing levels with a total audience delivery of 123.4 million average viewers across all platforms, including the CBS Television Network, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Univision, and CBS Sports, Univision and NFL digital properties, including NFL+.
Prior to that, AdImpact reported that viewing for Super Bowl LVIII peaked at 115.5 million. And prior to that, Samba TV indicated that about 39 million U.S. households tuned into the big game, up 6% from the 2023 Super Bowl.
According to the new custom survey, Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11 reached approximately 210 million viewers – nearly 2/3 of Americans – across CBS Television Network, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Univision, and CBS Sports, Univision and NFL digital properties, including NFL+. This is a 4% increase compared with the 202 million unique viewers reported in Nielsen's syndicated ratings service, which measures viewers that watched at least one minute of the game. The survey also revealed that the average minute audience was approximately 143 million viewers, the NFL and Nielsen reported.
The newest data, which managed to find millions of viewers not captured in other reports, was based on a custom survey of 5,267 households that examined the size of viewing groups, regardless of location, and to what extent those groups are larger than that which is currently measured by Nielsen today. The survey was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago using the AmeriSpeak panel.
“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," said Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer of the NFL. “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."
All the different measurement reports did agree on one thing, however: Super Bowl LVXII was the most-watched Super Bowl of all time.
