Super Bowl television ratings
One of the most watched annual sporting events in the world, the NFL's championship game is broadcast in over 130 countries in more than 30 languages.
[1] Viewership is predominantly North American;[2][3] the Super Bowl is the most watched television broadcast in the United States every year.
[10] However, the 2019 game became the least-watched in more than a decade and the household rating for the Super Bowl declined for the fourth consecutive year.
[56] With one team from each league competing against each other, the two networks agreed to pay $1 million each to simulcast Super Bowl I.
[57][58] Preliminary ratings for the game—which was controversially blacked out in Greater Los Angeles[54]—were released a day later and showed that the CBS feed was more popular than the NBC.
[61] However, the final Nielsen numbers later revealed the game was watched by 51.3 million total viewers and received a 36.8 rating and a 68 share—less than Super Bowl I.
[63] 1969's Super Bowl III received an initial rating of 39.9 and a share of 79 with over 60 million total viewers.
[62][65] The 1971 game was watched by 39.8% of American households, making the NBC broadcast the highest-rated sports event on a single network, beating the final game of the 1963 World Series[66] This record would be broken again the following year when the 1972 CBS broadcast of Super Bowl VI was watched by 44.2% of households.
[67] In 1973, Super Bowl VII was the first game to be exempt from a local television blackout following the amendment of an NFL policy requiring them at the time.
[62] In 1977, Super Bowl XI was watched by 81.9 million total viewers, beating the Game 7 viewership of the 1975 World Series and becoming the most-watched sports broadcast in American history.
[13] In 1979, the Super Bowl XIII broadcast recorded a drop in both average and total viewership, and the rating decreased by 0.1 to a 47.1, though all were the second-best numbers ever for the game and the share grew by 7 percentage points to a 74.
[76][77] Super Bowl LIV on Fox in 2020 opened up this decade amidst the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic at the time and saw significant ratings improvement from the 2 previous Super Bowl editions, but suffered lower ratings the year after,[78] with an average of 91.63 million alone on CBS - the lowest since 2006.
Due to a growing Hispanic football fanbase, Spanish-language broadcasts of the Super Bowl by American channels began in 2014.
However, reliable figures are only available since the 1990s when Nielsen began tracking viewership in the province of Ontario in 1991; electronic measurement of the game was not conducted by Numeris nationally until the mid-2000s.
Following the introduction of the Portable People Meter (PPM) in Canada in time for the 2010 game, viewership increased significantly compared to the previous decade.
Similar to the United States, ad prices have also increased over the years on English networks in Canada.
According to in-house research conducted by the network, the 1977 game was watched by approximately 3.5 million Canadians on the CBC's English and French television stations.
[94] In 1978, Nielsen conducted the first independent ratings survey and found that the 1978 game was watched by 4,495,000 million Canadians, including 550,000 on French television stations.
[149] The 1981 game was watched by 3.5 million on English television stations according to BBM; a later survey by the organization measured an audience of 4,482,000 viewers across both languages.
[153] According to the company's 1986 survey of the game, 4,065,000 Canadians watched Super Bowl XX, including 427,000 in Montreal alone.
[109] In 1999, Super Bowl XXXIII was watched by 3,399,000 viewers—the largest electronically measured audience in the game's Canadian broadcast history.
