Why the Super Bowl loses 18-49 demographics

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

This year’s game got 96.4 million viewers, the lowest rating since 2007. There are all sorts of theories as to why the number was so low. The game was not close. This season has been weird because of the pandemic. The musical guest The Weeknd was not a draw.

But none of this gets to the heart of the matter. Here are the Super Bowl ratings for ages 18 to 49 – the main demographics for advertisers – from the last ten years.

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

Forget about the blast game and the weird break show. Whether it’s a thrilling comeback of Tom Brady against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, a magnificent fourth-quarter Patrick Mahomes against the San Francisco 49ers in 2020 or Brady against Mahomes this year, it doesn’t matter. Fewer people under the age of 50 watch every year.

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

But these arguments are less convincing when you look at the ratings from 18 to 49 of “Sunday Night Football”, which have been remarkably constant in recent years, until this season full of pandemics.

A September and an October, once in a lifetime, in which all major sports took place at the same time, could have pushed the 2020 “Sunday Night Football” ratings down. We will have to see if 2021 returns to 2019 levels.

But the last three years show that there are a lot of hardcore football fans who still tune in every week.

This suggests that the steady decline in Super Bowl ratings is not happening because there are fewer football fans each year. Rather, it is due to the fact that fewer casual fans and non-sports spectators are granted.

The Super Bowl is simply not the event it once was.

This speaks of an essential change in the American media and has been noticeable for years. Think of those “Game of Thrones” essays from a few years ago, which were wondering if it was the last show the Americans watched together.

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

There are more ironies here.

When the pandemic began and the NBA and MLB delayed their seasons, sports fans assumed that people would desperately return to live sports once they resumed, both as a lifeline to normalcy and as something to do after the months. viewing recorded recordings.

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

This could also explain the sharp drop in Sunday Night Football spectators this year and in 2020 the viewing of sport in general. Instead, gaming hours and Netflix subscriptions increased during the pandemic. Etsy’s revenue has increased. So are pet adoptions.

But these free-falling audiences haven’t affected Super Bowl commercial rates, which have risen each year to this year to about $ 5.5 million in 30 seconds. The Super Bowl may be a melting iceberg, but it is still – by far – the most watched event of the year (including among the population aged 18 to 49). In addition, “Sunday Night Football” continues to be the most watched show from 18 to 49 years old, year after year.

Also, the fractured environment will not prevent ViacomCBS, Disney, Comcast and Fox from paying billions of dollars extra for NFL renewal rights – agreements that could come in a few weeks. In total, the NFL could receive $ 100 billion from networks over the next 10 years.

“If we stayed here today and just did a 20-year NFL renewal – and you’d ask me what’s on my mind – it would be the NFL renewal in 21 years,” said Eric Shanks, head of Fox Sports. . 2018.

This is the American media for short.

The old media is prepared to spend more and more on programming, while looking at data that suggests that Americans, en masse, want it less and less. They try to change their business for digital consumption, but they can only play the cards they have.

This does not take into account even the public under 18 years of age. When children grow up in an environment without parents who religiously read the newspaper’s sports page or adapt to the ESPN SportsCenter, the overall cultural relevance of the sport is at risk – especially when they have Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite free of charge.

The antidote can be sports betting – a relatively nascent industry that could attract casual fans between the ages of 18 and 49 to give sports a second chance. If sports gambling becomes legal in almost all 50 states, Super Bowl ratings may return.

That’s what companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are based on. Even Disney, a company that has long seen gambling as anathema to its family brand, is adamant about betting. However, Disney CEO Bob Chapek noted this week that he believes sports betting attracts hard-core fans rather than casual ones.

“It’s especially appealing to younger, very passionate sports audiences,” Chapek said of sports gambling during his company’s Thursday call. “We see the value in that.”

If the Super Bowl audience continues to decline, the most obvious centralized event to replace American television is … nothing. It’s hard to imagine that 50 million young people between the ages of 18 and 49 are watching a Super Bowl or UEFA Champions League e-sports in 20 years.

It is easier to imagine that the common experience of American television will slowly disappear.

SEE: Disney reports strong growth in paid subscribers in the first quarter