Why the Super Bowl is losing the 18-49 demographic

To understand the great challenge facing the American media, look at the Super Bowl ratings for the past ten years.

This year’s game had 96.4 million viewers, the lowest rating since 2007. There are all kinds of theories as to why the number was so low. The game has not ended. This season was strange because of the pandemic. Musical guest, The Weeknd was not quite a draw at halftime.

But none of this gets to the heart of the matter. Here are the Super Bowl ratings for people aged 18 to 49 – the top demographic for advertisers – for the past ten years.

Part of the decline is related to the increase in streaming, which is not captured in Nielsen data (but will be in 2024). But not so much. Some 5.7 million people watched the Super Bowl this year, compared to 3.4 million last year, according to The Streamable.

Forget about the explosive game and the strange show at halftime. Whether it’s an exciting Tom Brady comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, a magnificent Patrick Mahomes in the fourth quarter against the San Francisco 49ers in 2020 or Brady against Mahomes this year, it doesn’t matter. Fewer people under 50 attend each year.

Perhaps football is not as popular as it used to be. Perhaps younger viewers are discouraged by the way the league handled Colin Kaepernick or the concussions or superlong games riddled with commercials.

But those arguments are less convincing when you look at the 18 to 49 ratings on Sunday Night Football, which have remained remarkably stable in recent years, until this pandemic season.

Unique September and October in life, where all the major sports took place at the same time, may have dropped the “Sunday Night Football” ratings in 2020. We will have to see if 2021 returns to 2019 levels.

But the previous three years show that there are many extreme football fans who were still tuned in every week.

This suggests that the steady decline in Super Bowl ratings is not happening because there are fewer football fans each year. Instead, it is because fewer casual fans and non-sports viewers are watching.

Simply put, the Super Bowl is not the event it was before.

This shows an essential change in the American media, and has been noticeable for years. Remember those “Game of Thrones” rehearsals from a few years ago that questioned whether it was the last show that Americans watched together.

The media is fractured. With so many possible options on 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 of before.

There are several ironies here.

When the pandemic started and the NBA and MLB delayed their seasons, sports fans assumed that people would desperately return to live sports as soon as they resumed, both as a lifesaver for normalcy and as something to do after months of watching. the recorded schedule.

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

This may also explain the sudden drop in audience for “Sunday Night Football” this year and in 2020 the display of sports in general. In contrast, Netflix’s game hours and subscriptions skyrocketed during the pandemic. Etsy’s revenue soared. So do pet adoptions.

But those free-falling audiences did not affect the Super Bowl’s commercial rates, which increased each year until it reached the plateau this year by about $ 5.5 million per 30-second ad. The Super Bowl may be a melting iceberg, but it is still – by far – the most watched event of the year (including among the 18- to 49-year-old demographic). In addition, “Sunday Night Football” remains the most watched program for 18 to 49 years, year after year.

The fragmented media environment will also not prevent ViacomCBS, Disney, Comcast and Fox from paying billions more dollars for the NFL’s renewal rights – deals that could arrive in the coming weeks. In all, the NFL may receive $ 100 billion from networks over the next 10 years.

“If we were here today and we had a 20-year NFL renewal – and you asked me what’s on my mind – it would be to renew the NFL in 21 years,” said Eric Shanks, Fox Sports chief, in December 2018.

This is the American media in a nutshell.

Legacy media is prepared to spend more and more on programming, while analyzing data that suggests that Americans, en masse, want less and less. They are trying to change their business to digital consumption, but they can only play the cards they have.

This doesn’t even count for audiences under 18. When children grow up in a parentless environment who religiously read the newspaper’s sports page or tune in to ESPN’s SportsCenter, the overall cultural relevance of sports is at risk – especially when they have free Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite to play with.

The antidote may be sports betting – a relatively fledgling industry that can attract casual 18- to 49-year-old fans to give sports a second chance. If gambling becomes legal in almost all 50 states, it is possible that the Super Bowl ratings could resurface.

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 enjoying the idea of ​​gambling. Still, Disney CEO Bob Chapek noted this week that he thinks sports betting attracts the radical fan, rather than the casual.

“It is particularly attractive to the young, sports-loving audience,” Chapek said of gambling during his company’s earnings conference call on Thursday. “We see the value of that.”

If the Super Bowl audience continues to decline, the most obvious centralized US TV replacement event is … nothing. It is hard to imagine 50 million young people aged 18 to 49 watching a Super Bowl or a UEFA Champions League in 20 years.

It is easier to imagine that the shared experience of American television will slowly disappear.

WATCH: Disney reported strong growth in paid streaming subscribers in first quarter