hello all, i was reading some news about the nfl netflix deal and came across some statistics on the christmas games viewership from last year which was around 29 million for the chiefs game. I was wondering how is this calculated, is it average viewership per minute? how do most of these people watch the games. does this include estimates for people who watch the games ilegally, international viewers, parties or families watching together? this number really doesnt tell me anything, was wondering if anybody has an idea.
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It is done through estimation, but streaming platforms can also actually measure this.
Historically, estimates of viewership were based on taking a large sample of viewing using Nielson in home monitoring equipment. So a sample of 1% of people times 1000 people watching equals 100,000 people viewership.
Today, there are much better systems. Netflix can tell you exactly how many people watched the show and when.
The NFL app can do the same. So basically, they take TV estimates and combine it with estimates or measurements from other media formats.
Surveys can tell you that 10% of fans that watch the game live use the app, and since the app has 100,000 users, then you have 1 million viewers.
It’s a big estimate we probably can assume is fairly accurate but all they can do is surveys (and things like them) to get a decent idea of how many people were watching.
Even if they had a count of how many TVs were tuned in (and I believe they don’t for traditional TV networks), it wouldn’t mean much as lots of TVs stay on in empty/uninterested restaurants or bars and stuff like that, but especially with the Super Bowl they have to figure out an estimate for the average number of people sitting in front of the TV.
The only saving grace is that usually the numbers are pretty believable. It gets hard to dispute that 10% ish of Americans watched the Christmas game especially when people in other countries also would have watched. It’s very believable.
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