NFL Ratings Were Up in 2018
by EG
Despite a concerted effort by Donald Trump to evoke anger at NFL players over the national anthem controversy, NFL broadcasts on TV actually boasted improved ratings in 2018. Read on for details.
Via Deadline.
After the national anthem controversy took a toll on NFL ratings last fall, pushing down TV ratings, the games’ performance recovered in 2018, with the main football franchises posting year-to-year gains.
The recently concluded 13th season of NBC’s Sunday Night Football drew an average of 19.3 million Live+same day viewers, up 7% from last year. SNF is projected to finish as primetime’s No. 1 TV show in all key metrics for the 2018-19 season for an eighth consecutive year, based on official L+SD data provided by Nielsen. (Compared with 2017, SNF was down by a fraction, -2%.)
ESPN’s Monday Night Football (11.65 million viewers) was up 8% vs. 2017 and also up 2% vs. 2016. MNF finished the season as the most-watched series on cable for the second straight calendar year.
In its debut season on Fox, Thursday Night Football drew 14.3 million viewers (Fox+NFL Network). That was higher than the 2017 averages on both CBS (14.23 million on CBS+NFLN) and NBC (13.58 million on NBC+NFLN), which shared the franchise. (TNF too was below its 2016 benchmark.)
Get the rest of the story at Deadline.
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