That makes the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory over the Philadelphia Eagles not only 1% bigger than last year’s Rams-Bengals game, but the third biggest television program of all time. The only telecasts to ever score a larger audience have been two other Super Bowls: the 2015 Patriots-Seahawks game (114.4 million) and the 2017 Patriots-Falcons game (113.7 million).
Super Bowl audience should be 20% higher, NFL says
Nielsen undercounted the number of people who watched the Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl earlier this month, according to a custom survey commissioned by the NFL and conducted in collaboration with Nielsen.
According to the survey’s findings from 5,189 U.S. households, the game’s average minute audience jumps by 20% – to 136 million viewers from the 113 million originally reported. “The number that really got our attention was the average audience measure,” said Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer at the NFL. “That was a 20% lift versus the traditional Nielsen measure, and that’s a really, really big number.”
The survey has the Super Bowl reaching around 200 million unique viewers who watched at least one minute of the event, up 9% from the 183 million that originally was reported.
Probably comes down to under counting out of home viewers like previous surveys.
And according to those time-zone-adjusted fast-national numbers from Nielsen, it bested the previous year’s 3.8 rating by 5% in key adults 18-49, earning a 4.0 in the demo.
UPDATE 31/5