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How Many Are Watching? Estimating the number of Super Bowl viewers
The Super Bowl: an enormous televised extravaganza, watched by a worldwide audience of one billion viewers. That's what "people" said, anyway, and "they" said it often enough that the figure seemed to assume an air of authority.
But it's not true. The Super Bowl have never drawn an audience of a billion (and neither has the Oscars telecast, either).
"There has never been a television event in the history of the world that had a billion viewers," said the Academy Awards's executive director, Bruce Davis, when asked about the figure two years ago. "It's a handy number to throw around, but it's not true."
In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, columnist Steve Rushin nicely dismantles the billion figure as it applies to the Super Bowl. It turns out a media research firm measured the worldwide audience for last year's game and came up with a figure of 93 million, only about 2 million of them from outside North America.
As for the NFL, they officially "say" (on their website, no less) the Super Bowl TV audience for last year's game was the most watched program ever with 144.4 million viewers. "They" (again, the NFL) "say" the 10 most-watched programs in TV history are all Super Bowls.
Still, that's a little shy of the Billion Viewer claim...that would never happen to Donald Trump, would it?
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posted by Unknown @ Sunday, February 05, 2006,
