As fans find more and more ways to watch pro football live, it’s becoming harder and harder to properly calculate the number of fans who are actually watching live pro football.
As it relates to the triple header of NFL games from Thanksgiving, the NFL contends that the actual audience for the trio of contests was 31 percent higher than previously reported by Nielsen, the company that for decades has generated the ratings numbers for television.
The league has issued a statement in which it explains that it “collaborated” with Nielsen on a “survey” in order to “complement” Nielsen’s data, in order to provide a “detailed picture” of the number of people who watched the games “particularly in group settings.”
The survey of 5,800 households resulted in a conclusion that the average-minute audience for the three games was 44.1 million, a 31-percent bump over the 33.6 million that Nielsen initially reported.
“The results showcase the unique nature of Thanksgiving Day football, which for football fans has become intrinsically intertwined with a national holiday that brings families and friends together for a day of appreciation and gratitude,” the league said in a statement. “Many watch in larger-than-normal group settings such as an extended family member or friend’s home, bar, or restaurant. . . . With three games spread across the entire day, the opportunity to catch the games while preparing the big meal, visiting multiple households on the same afternoon, or perhaps even after the neighborhood’s touch-football game provides fans ample chance to catch NFL action.”
Numbers were not generated (or, more accurately, not released) as to the specific games. The Giants-Cowboys contest was the most-watched regular season game ever, with 42 million viewers watching, on average. Was it 31 percent higher than that? That would be an astonishing (and perhaps facially implausible) audience of 55 million.
The key word for all of this is “credible.” Surveys become extrapolations. Any calculation like this hinges on a series of assumptions and approximations. There’s simply no way of assessing the quality of the assumptions and approximations without: (1) having full access to all of the information that was collected; and (2) knowing enough about the industry to properly assess whether any, some, or all of the assumptions were conservative, aggressive, or somewhere in between.
I’m NOT saying that creative accounting was used here. But there’s always going to be a clear temptation to find ways to construct survey questions, to select geographic locations for implementing the survey, and to analyze the numbers in a way that gently pushes them higher. As pointed out earlier this year after the first wave of Amazon numbers, there’s always room for a healthy dose of skepticism when the fox is doing the official henhouse inventory.
That said, the combination of captive audience and three compelling games undoubtedly generated a very big TV audience. Was it 31 percent higher than 33.6 million? No one will ever know with certainty. Regardless, it’s fair to say it was massive, and impressive. The NFL is the one product that can consistently collect and deliver a gigantic audience, even at a time when fewer and fewer people gather around the TV (or the computer or the tablet or the phone) to watch the same thing at the same time.
