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Every week I have to figure out the best way to use numbers to tell the viewership story of a given show, film, sport or special. If one rule guides my analysis, it’s that I never want to put out a chart, table, graph, or visual that’s actively misleading.
But the problem is that not all “not misleading” charts—sorry for the double negative there—are created equal. Some charts tell the story better than others. But some charts tell certain stories better than others, but also tell different stories. All those stories together probably get to the truth. And hence why even in a simple topic like “What’s the state of comic book movies” I ended up making ten charts!
I bring all that up because I never properly summarized the state of streaming football viewership for the 2024 season. There are a bunch of ways I could visualize the last three years of viewership—we only have Nielsen viewership for that time period—some of which I think are better than others, but all of which tell fun stories. Like the (probably overused) parable of the blind wisemen touching an elephant, each chart tells a different part of streaming football’s story.
So let’s dive in!
The NFL’s 2024 Streaming Viewership
Let’s start with what is probably the third best look, which is just the total hours of streaming football viwwership over time:
In this case, one could argue this chart is slightly misleading, because the number of games has increased over time. That’s a fair point! We can account for that by looking at per-game viewership. Here’s that look:
Why include both charts? Because both the average viewership per game AND the total hours of streaming football matter, and those two stories are driven by two separate trends. The total hours number, for example, shows how many more football games are streaming now, while the per-game numbers show that more customers are also watching those games. The percentage increases, though, show that the number of games has increased more than the number of customers watching.
The other change, besides the number of games, is the type of games. Naturally, more viewers want to watch the playoffs than regular season games, so let’s account for that. So here’s the total viewership by the type of game, either Thursday Night football, Black Friday, wildcard playoffs, Monday Night Football, or Christmas Day:
This, too, is plagued by the “number of games” problem, so let’s adjust for that again:
Lastly, we could skip the “brands” and just break things out by streamer. I suppose I could do this by brand and by streamer…but that’s too deep. Just know that Peacock has had one playoff game, as had Prime Video. The rest of Amazon’s games are Thursday Night Football. I won’t do totals here, but here are the by-game numbers:
Essentially, these last five charts are all different ways to synthesize the by-game chart I put out each week, color coded by streamer:
Of the above, which is the best chart to understand streaming football viewership for the last three seasons? My take is all of them. Honestly, each chart tells a slightly different story about the growth in streaming football. Here are some quick takeaways:
Thursday Night Football drives the most viewing by far, and it’s grown each year for Amazon.
The playoffs drastically outperform the regular season, even on streaming.
Netflix did really well with its Christmas Day games.
ESPN+ has the (dis)honor of being the biggest underperformer.
That all said, we don’t have data for either NBC, ESPN, Paramount or Fox streaming football yet, so these numbers, if anything, undersell streaming’s growth.
Through it all, the story is growth, growth, growth and football remains the king on TV, even streaming. As I just wrote for the Ankler, everyone knows that the NFL owns 72 of the top 100 telecasts each year, but even on streaming football took the top spot on the charts for 13 of the last 17 weeks of the year, and if it wasn’t in first place, it was in second place.
Live sports work.