It may have been all about the ads, but yesterday’s Super Bowl (the Philadelphia Eagles beating the New England Patriots 41-33) pulled its worst TV audience since 2009.
That said, some 103.4 million Americans still tuned-in to watch the Eagles win their inaugural flag.
It was down 7.1 per cent on last year’s viewer numbers and when online viewers were included, the audience was 106 million, a drop of 6.8 per cent from the year previous and still not as big as the turnout for the 2010 Super Bowl.
Despite the drop in viewers the game will still be the biggest TV event on US screens for 2018. And, when put into context, yesterday’s game was still the tenth most watched show in US TV history.
The record for a Super Bowl audience was in 2015, when a whopping 114.4 million viewers tuned in.
Not that Super Bowl itself is on the wane. Of the top 10 shows for viewer numbers in US TV history, nine of those are Super Bowls. The famous MASH finale from 1983 still rates (with 106 million viewers) and remains ninth overall and the only non-gridiron show in the top 10.
