Why the Super Bowl loses the demographics of 18-49

To understand the great challenge facing American media, look at Super Bowl ratings over the past ten years.

This year’s match received 96.4 million viewers, the lowest score since 2007. There are all sorts of theories about the fact that the number was so low. The match was not close. This season was strange due to the pandemic. Music guest The Weeknd was not much rest time.

But none of this touches the flesh of the issue. Here’s a Super Bowl rating of 18 to 49 year olds – the most important demographic for advertisers – over the past ten years.

Some of the decline is related to the increase in streaming, which is not captured in Nielsen data (but will be in 2024). But not so much. About 5.7 million people streamed the Super Bowl this year, up from 3.4 million last year, according to The Streamable.

Forget the standout game and weird rest time performance. Whether it’s an exciting comeback from Tom Brady against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, a magnificent Patrick Mahomes fourth quarter against the San Francisco 49ers in 2020, or Brady against Mahomes this year, it does not matter. Fewer people under 50 watch every year.

Maybe football is not as popular as it used to be. Perhaps younger viewers are turned off by the league’s handling of Colin Kaepernick or concussion or the super-long games packed by commercials.

But these arguments are less convincing when you look at 18 to 49 “Sunday Night Football” ratings, which have been remarkably steady in recent years, up to this pandemic-laden season.

A one-off September and October, where all the major sports took place at the same time, may have lowered the ‘Sunday Night Football’ rating in 2020. We need to see if 2021 returns to 2019 levels.

But the past three years show that there are a lot of hardcore football fans who have been tuning in every week.

This indicates that the steady decline in the Super Bowl rating is not happening because there are fewer football fans every year. This is rather because less comfortable fans and non-sports viewers join in.

Simply put, The Super Bowl is not the event it once was.

This speaks to a significant change in the American media, and it has been remarkable for years. Think back to the “Game of Thrones” essays of a few years ago that pondered if this would be the last show that Americans watched together.

Media is broken. With as many choices as possible about what to do at any given time – video games, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, Snapchat, Disney + – the Super Bowl can never be the cultural experience it once was.

Here are some ironies.

When the pandemic began and the NBA and MLB delayed their seasons, sports fans assumed that people would desperately return to live sports once it resumed, both as a lifeline to normal and as something to do after months of watched programs.

Instead, it seems that Americans developed other entertainment habits during the pandemic.

It could also explain the sudden decline in “Sunday Night Football” viewers this year and in 2020 sports viewing in general. By contrast, game hours and Netflix subscriptions skyrocketed during the pandemic. Etsy’s revenue has risen. So do pets.

But these free-falling audiences did not affect the Super Bowl commercial rates, which rose to about $ 5.5 million per 30-second place each year until the plateau this year. The Super Bowl may be a melting iceberg, but it’s still – by far – the most worrying event of the year (also among the 18 to 49 demographics). In addition, ‘Sunday Night Football’ is still the most watched program from 18 to 49 year after year.

The broken media environment will also not stop ViacomCBS, Disney, Comcast and Fox from paying billions more for NFL renewal rights – deals that could come within weeks. In all, the NFL could raise $ 100 billion from the networks over the next ten years.

“If we sat here today and just did a 20-year NFL renewal – and you asked me what’s most important to me – it’s going to renew the NFL in 21 years’s,” said Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks , said in December. 2018.

This is American media in a nutshell.

Heritage media is willing to spend more and more on programs while looking at data that suggests Americans want it more and more. They try to adapt their businesses for digital consumption, but they can only play the cards they have.

It is not even responsible for the audience under 18. If children grow up in an environment without parents who read the newspaper’s sports page religiously or watch ESPN’s SportsCenter, the overall cultural importance of sports is at stake – especially if they have commercial free Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite to play with.

The antidote can be sports betting – a relatively emerging industry that could lure the 18 to 49 comfortable fans to give sports a second chance. If sports gambling becomes legal in nearly all 50 countries, it is possible that Super Bowl ratings could rise again.

This is what companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are counting on. Even Disney, a company that has long considered gambling to be an anema to its family brand, is excited about the idea of ​​betting. Still, Disney CEO Bob Chapek remarked this week that he thinks sports betting appeals to the stubborn fan, rather than the casual one.

“It’s especially appealing to the younger, very passionate sports audience,” Chapek said of sports gambling during his company’s Thursday earnings. “We do see the value in it.”

If the Super Bowl audience continues to decline, the most obvious American TV replacement event … is nothing. It’s hard to imagine 50 million 18- to 49-year-olds going to watch an e-sports Super Bowl or UEFA Champions League football within 20 years.

It’s easier to imagine that the shared American television experience will slowly die out.

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