My best friend’s husband told me that worldwide, the Super Bowl pulls in more television viewers than the entire MLB season. I would assume this also includes the World Series. I would like to see some actual numbers before I believe this. I found this site which throws out the number 800 million for the Super Bowl. I’m having trouble finding numbers for baseball. Can I get some help here?
It wouldn’t surprise me. Baseball on the radio is extremely popular - I’m not the only one who prefers it on the radio rather than television. Football is far more popular on TV than on the radio.
How are you counting? For instance, if there’s somebody who’s watched 30 baseball games over the course of the season, does that person count as one viewer or 30?
Either way, I can believe the claim. The Super Bowl is a “big event” that lots of people watch, even people who have no interest in football but watch it for the commercials or the halftime show or just because everybody else is.
The way he explained it to me was that each game’s viewership counted. So, if there are 12 games played on April 7 and each game had one million viewers, that’d be 12 million viewers for April 7. Then on the 8th, there are 8 games, each with a million viewers, that’s be 8 million viewers, which brings the season total so far to 20 million.
The problem to me is that it would be very difficult to gather viewerships of each individual game because 1) Most are regional and 2) There are so many games played over the season.
Thanks to XM, I now have all the games on the radio (with a slight delay, of course.) Last postseason, I had the games on XM because of ESPN Radio. So I would actually put the game on the TV, but mute the sound and listen to the radio play-by-play. While the play-by-play was behind a bit, it was far better than listening to Fox’s TV announcers. Baseball works well on the radio because of the pace. Sure, you can’t see the way the fielders are playing or how far off the bag the runner is or anything like that, but you never see it on TV either. I have listened to football over the radio, and it doesn’t work as well because there is just too much action. Saying that the runner gained five yards up the middle tells me what happened, but it’s harder to visualize what all was going on.
I don’t buy the 800 million number. Why would three times the population of the US want to watch the Superbowl?
We always watch our local football team with the national broadcast on TV, sound down, and the local radio announcer on.
I don’t look at the 800 million figure as 3x the US as much as I do closer to 1/8 the world population, which is reasonable in these days of global communications. The SB is a huge media spectacle, it draws internationally-known performers (international performers come to think of it; Paul McCartney this year), and American football is broadcast to more and more places - people are becoming familiar with the game. Plus quite a number of people outside of the US bet on it just as we do.
Well, I just did another google, this time using “800 million” “Super bowl” and got the official Super Bowl website that gives this as the 2005 viewership. Apparently it was shown in 220 countries in 28 languages. But that doesn’t help with the baseball viewership side.
But who knows what the ratings are for the Super Bowl in other countries? How many people in India want to watch the Super Bowl? How many in Kazakhstan? There is a big potential audience, but it’s sad to say that a lot of people just won’t watch. If you compared a World Cup Final’s viewership to that of the Super Bowl for Europe, I’m certain that the World Cup will dwarf the Super Bowl.
The ratings for any one regular season baseball game will be low. But there are also 2430 regular season baseball games.
See, this is some valuable information. Wouldn’t you think that each game would have more than 200,00 viewers? Unless my math is off (which is possible), wouldn’t that be all that was needed, per game, to beat the viewership of the Super Bowl? That’s not even counting the huge increase for nationwide weekly games, plus the World Series.
That might be a reasonable figure for the total number with access to a TV at all. Remember, most of the world’s population is in the least technologically and economically advanced regions. But I find it hard to believe that most people with access to a TV were all watching the Superbowl. Heck, most folks here on the Dope have access to TV, and there was still plenty of discussion here about the Puppy Bowl and other such competing shows.
From this article
"Believe it or not, 70 per cent of the world’s population don’t own televisions, or even read newspapers. "
If the world population is about 6 billion, that would mean 1.8 trillion people have tv’s, right? So, about 1/2 of the world’s population watch the Super Bowl?
I’m really not questioning the Super Bowl viewership stats, BTW. I’m more interested in finding out the baseball viewership in comparison.
I think that most Americans vastly overestimate the popularity of football outside of the US. Emphasis on vastly. Outside of Canada, no one else plays it at anything higher than a recreational level. The European League is an experiment that is failing badly. Attendance is terrible and all the players are Americans.
Of the four major professional sports played in the US, football would rank a distant fourth in popularity outside of this country.
Now, I’m not claiming that American football itself is globally popular (although it is more so now than ever, esp. in Latin America), or that all of the people watching were football fans. There are millions of Americans who don’t watch any other game the whole season, who don’t care about football per se, or do watch college football but not the NFL (except for the SB), who will watch the SB. It’s something of an event, and I can completely believe the 800 million figure. You’ve got a good 150 million to start with in the US alone. Apparently well over a million watched in the UK, DirecTV beamed the game to 1.6 million in Latin America alone; that’s not counting the regular broadcasts via normal airwaves. I know you can catch NFL games in Mexico and Guatemala at the very least, having seen them in those places myself.
There appear to be, from a few UNESCO & World Bank tables & articles I looked up, to be in the neighborhood of 250 TVs in the world per thousand popualtion. So say a TV for every 4 people (the numbers have apparently exploded in the last decade in the developing world.) But the numbers of people with access to a TV - at a neighbor’s place, at a bar, etc., is probably approaching 50% of the world’s population. Considering that TV viewing is often done in groups, especially for ‘events’ (how many Americans watched the Super Bowl at home alone for that matter?), this seems more than enough to justify the 800 million number.
If there are, say, 2400 baseball games per year, then we’re talking 330,000 viewers per game to keep pace with the SB. Most baseball games are either on UHF stations in comparatively small TV markets or on cable networks for the hardcore sports enthusiast. I imagine many major league teams don’t get over 160,000 viewers (splitting the viewership between the two markets and not even touching the issue of local TV blackouts) for any particular one of their games the entire season.
I don’t doubt for a second that football is less popular than the other 3 American sports (if we want to count hockey as a major American sport…), but this has little to do with watching a 5-hour annual media spectacle.
I’d love to see a cite for the 800 million SB viewers worldwide that does not come from a source with a vested interest in hyping it up. I tend to believe that the number comes from "this is how many people could watch it if they wanted to, and who wouldn’t want to view such an amazing spectacle?
If we grant 150 million viewers in the US, we’ve got to find 650 million in the rest of the world, which is approximately 11% of the world’s population.
Now, one problem is that for the vast majority of the world’s population, it’s already Monday when the SB starts. So, rather than being on a day that most people get off from work (i.e. Sunday in the US), it’s during the working week.
I don’t know where that statistic comes from, but it seems to me to be terribly damning support for the “800 million” claim. Of all countries outside North America, one would expect the UK to be more interested in the SB than the average of other countries. The number of TV sets is large, there’s a major cultural resonance between the UK and the US, and the UK has one of the European League teams (in American Football), which means that they can get local exposure to the game if they want it.
Let’s say that the “over a million” number for the UK is 1.5 million (if it were higher, they’d call it “nearly two million”). Thats about 2.5% of the population.
So, if only ~2.5% of UK residents watch the SB, why would we believe that ~11% of the rest of the world (outside the US) does? What’s pulling the Indians and Chinese in?
Why is it sad that people choose not to spend several hours of their time watching a sporting event that has no cultural relevance for them? I agree that it would be sad if they wanted to watch but couldn’t (e.g. a 1999 movie, Phorpha, told the true story of a group of soccer-mad Tibetan monks and their quest to watch the (soccer) World Cup on TV), but where’s the sorrow if they can watch but choose not to? More power to 'em, say I.
If the figure from the cited article is correct 30% of 6 billion is 1.8 billion. So if the 800 million Super-Bowl watching figure is also correct than less than half of the world’s TV owning population is watching the Super Bowl.
As others have pointed out though one doesn’t need to own a TV to watch one. But count me among those who believe that the 800 million figure is inflated. If for no other reason than that on large portions of the planet there is no systematic way to figure out what, if anything, people may or may not be watching.
I seem to remember reading an article on the very subject of actual worldwide Super Bowl viewership within the last few years. Maybe in the Wall Street Journal? Anyway the consensus was the NFL used a lot of fuzzy math to arrive at their numbers and the figures the league gives are almost certainly inflated.
“Watched the Super Bowl” is a misnomer too. I’ve attended more than one Super Bowl party where the game was on and no one was riveted to the screen watching the game. If there’s a party and half the people at there aren’t watching the game, but are only there for the party, how is that counted? I’ll bet the NFL counts them. I don’t believe the NFL’s propaganda machine. 800 million viewers, my foot. I’m going to need an independent audit before I buy that figure.
Having said that, as for MLB, there are 30 teams that each play 162 games and I’m guessing 80% of those games are televised. That makes the number of televised games equal to ( (30 X 162 /2) * .8) = 1944. Eight Hundred M viewers divided by 1944 games = 411,523 viewers per MLB game. Does each MLB game attract 411, 523 viewers per game? Put it another way, when the Indians play the Tigers or the Padres play the Pirates, between those cities are 420,000 people watching at least part of the game? I’d say so, but I don’t know for sure.
I find it much harder to believe that the average MLB game would draw 200,000 viewers in both of the home markets of the teams playing than that the SB has 800 million viers!
AFAIK, Nielsen ratings always count everyone in the room as “watching” the show regardless of how many are actually paying attention.
Actually another thought struck me: in a lot of the world you have only 1-5 or so TV channels! Unless you’re very rich and have a satelite dish. The SB could easily be the best, most exotic… or only :eek: thing on! Multiply that through 220 countries, & I still believe the 800 mil figure.
Sorry for the serial posting, but I’ve been trying to find harder numbers, which has been difficult. Let’s put it this way: if the SB was on in 220 countries (most of which only have a few channels, and poor production budgets), it’s not a stretch to say those countries add up to about 90% of the world’s population, or just under 5,500,000,000 people. So only an average of about 14% of people in each country would need to watch it to attain 800 million. (Actually after you chop the US viewership out of the 800 million, the average % in the other 219 countries you need drops precipitously.)
Out of curiousity, I checked it out and 3.1 million Canadians watched (just under 10% of the country), making it #2 in the ratings behind, perhaps ironically, American Idol! That’s only about 900,000 Canadians less than watched the Grey Cup, the CFL championship.
This professor has called out the NFL on its Super Bowl viewership stats.
http://www.uni.edu/pubrel/newsroom/releases/012301.html
As for my choice of words, I didn’t mean it’s sad that people don’t watch the Super Bowl. I meant that it’s sad that the NFL misstates the numbers and that people in the U.S. think that everything we show on TV is incredibly popular in the rest of the world.