Why the Super Bowl Loses 18-49 Demographics

Watch the Super Bowl reviews of the past decade to understand the great challenge facing the US media.

This year’s game received 96.4 million viewers, the lowest rating since 2007. There are many theories as to why the number was so low. The game was not close. This season was strange because of the pandemic. Musical guest The Weeknd wasn’t much of a draw at halftime.

But none of that gets to the heart of the matter. Here are Super Bowl ratings for 18- to 49-year-olds – the main target audience for advertisers – over the past ten years.

Part of the decline is related to the rise of streaming, which is not captured in Nielsen data (but in 2024). But not that 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 burst game and the weird halftime show. Whether it’s Tom Brady’s thrilling comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, Patrick Mahomes’ magnificent fourth quarter against the San Francisco 49ers in 2020 or Brady against Mahomes this year, it doesn’t matter. Fewer people under 50 watch each year.

Maybe football isn’t as popular as it used to be. Maybe younger viewers are turned off by the way the competition deals with Colin Kaepernick or the concussion or the super long games full of commercials.

But those arguments are less convincing when you consider the 18-to-49 ratings of “Sunday Night Football,” which have been remarkably stable over the years, right up to this pandemic season.

A once-in-a-lifetime September and October, where all the major sports took place at the same time, may have cut 2020 ratings for “Sunday Night Football”. We will have to see if 2021 returns to the level of 2019.

But the past three years show that there are plenty of hardcore football fans who were still tuning in every week.

This suggests that the steady decline in Super Bowl ratings is not happening as there are fewer football fans every year. Rather, it’s because fewer casual fans and non-sports viewers tune in.

Simply put, the Super Bowl is no longer the event it once was.

This speaks of an essential change in the American media, and it has been noticeable for years. Think back to those “Game of Thrones” essays from a few years ago that considered whether it would be the last show Americans watched together.

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

There are several ironies here.

When the pandemic started and the NBA and MLB delayed their seasons, sports fans assumed people would desperately return to live sports once it resumed, both as a life raft to normalcy and as a thing to do after months of watching recorded shows.

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

This may also explain the sudden drop in the viewership of “Sunday Night Football” this year and the number of viewers in 2020 in general. Game hours and Netflix subscriptions, on the other hand, soared during the pandemic. Etsy’s earnings have skyrocketed. So adoption of pets.

But this free-falling audience hasn’t impacted the Super Bowl commercial rates, which have soared every year to plateau at around the $ 5.5 million per 30 second spot this year. The Super Bowl may be a melting iceberg, but it’s still – by far – the most watched event of the year (including among the 18 to 49 demographics). In addition, “Sunday Night Football” remains the most watched show by 18 to 49 year olds year after year.

The fragmented media environment will also not stop ViacomCBS, Disney, Comcast and Fox from paying billions of dollars more for NFL renewal rights – deals that could come in a few weeks. In total, the NFL can withdraw $ 100 billion from the networks over the next 10 years.

“If we sat here today and just did a 20-year NFL extension – and you asked me what I was thinking – it would renew the NFL in 21 years,” Fox Sports chief Eric Shanks said in December. 2018.

That is American media in a nutshell.

Ancient media are willing to spend more and more on programming, staring at data suggesting Americans want it en masse less and less. They are trying to adapt their business for digital consumption, but they can only play the cards they have.

This does not even apply to the public under the age of 18. When children grow up in an environment with no parents religiously reading the newspaper’s sports page or tuning into ESPN’s SportsCenter, the overall cultural relevance of sports is at risk – especially if they have commercial free Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite to play with.

The antidote could be sports betting – a relatively burgeoning industry that could entice the casual fan aged 18 to 49 to give sports a second chance. If sports gambling becomes legal in nearly all 50 states, it’s possible the Super Bowl ratings will get a resurgence.

That’s what companies like FanDuel and DraftKings count on. Even Disney, a company that has long viewed gambling as anathema to its family brand, is warm to the idea of ​​gambling. Still, Disney CEO Bob Chapek noted this week that he thinks sports betting appeals to the real fan, rather than the regular.

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

If the Super Bowl audience continues to dwindle, the most obvious centralized replacement event for US TV is … nothing. It’s hard to imagine 50 million 18-49 year-olds watching an esports Super Bowl or UEFA Champions League football in 20 years.

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

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