TV viewing audience: Super Bowl vs. MLB season

Factual Questions
21

Having read the link (and thanks for posting it), I don’t think the doc has refuted the numeric claim at all.

He correctly points out that other one-day sporting events draw larger numbers than the SB. But I’m not sure that the NFL was claiming that is the world’s biggest one-day event, although it is the country’s biggest one-day sporting event, no question. So he’s critizing the NFL for making a claim they didn’t make (not in any of the articles I read or on the obvious place to put such a claim on their own website . Obviously the World Cup (soccer) final is bigger gloablly, and it’d be stupid to claim otherwise.

Oddly, Doc Martin says:

Dead wrong, Doc, it’s #1 in the USA with a bullet. Perhaps you meant “in the world?”

Interestingly, he accepts the viewership numbers of 3 other globally televised sports apparently without verifying their “estimates” (the word used in the article)! That’s quite the double standard. And are the world cricket and rugby finals numbers also for a one-day event?

As has been said on these boards a thousand times, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. “We couldn’t find other numbers to back you up” is a bad logical argument, especially coming from people who don’t want to find those numbers.

I get the impression that these fellows have a problem with football, or the dominant mainstream American culture that would watch it. [whiny undergrad voice] They’re just, like, so much more cultured in Europe, y’know dude?[/whiny undergrad voice]

22

There are a couple of things that change all of those average viewer figures in determining if yearly MLB viewership equals the Super Bowl: The playoffs and other national broadcasts.

According to Fox Sports, the World Series alone averaged a little over 25 million viewers a game(link) . By the rules of this game, that’s 100 million viewers, just for the World Series. If the other post-season games only averaged 1/4 of the ratings of the world Series, there’s almost another 200 million. Toss in a few dozen nationally broadcast regular season games, and it really starts to add up and those local broadcasts have to average a lot fewer viewers to beat even the possibly inflated number of 800 million.

23

In these cases, it’s more likely that you wouldn’t be able to watch the Superbowl unless you had a satellite dish. In such limited markets like the one you describe, the money to be made by broadcasting the Superbowl wouldn’t justify the cost of purchasing the broadcast rights for a local network. It could, however, be profitable for a multinational satellite network like BSkyB or SkyPerfect. I agree with Antonius Block, it sounds much more like 800 million people could have watched the Superbowl.

And for a data point, the Superbowl was only viewable on satellite TV in Japan. It was broadcast Monday morning from 8-11am, when the overwhelming majority of viewers were at work or otherwise engaged. To add to the confusion of the discussion, MLB games are also shown on Satellite TV here, and judging by how few people I asked even knew what the Superbowl was, let alone that it was on or who was playing, I’d say MLB viewers in this market outnumber Superbowl viewers by a wide margin.

24

Crandolph, I’m glad you’re coming up with these numbers because (assuming they’re valid) they help us in our fight against ignorance, but I really don’t think the Canadian audience helps your case any.

Even more so than the UK (see my post #14), one would expect Canada to be second only to the US in terms of per capita Super Bowl viewership. It is the only other country that can be said to play American-style football to any extent, Canadians are exposed to US media to a greater degree than any other country, and (very importantly) the SB takes place during the daytime on Sunday in Canada, just as in the US. TV ownership is high, so pretty much any Canadian that wants to can watch the SB. Yet, fewer than 10% of Canadians choose to do so! That, to me, is the final nail in the “800 million viewers” claim’s coffin.

So far, we have the following numbers, all supplied by you, and each of them seeming perfectly believable to me given the Nielsen “everyone in the room counts” methodology:
[ul]
[li]US: 150 million, ~50%[/li][li]Canada: 3.1 million, ~10%[/li][li]UK: >1 million, say 1.5 million or 2.5%[/li][/ul]
And yet, we’re supposed to believe that the rest of the world averages about 11% viewership (calculation in post #14), despite the fact that the NFL link that you provided shows that in most countries the SB is available only via cable/satellite or via AFRTS (the US Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, which is not accessible to most of a country’s residents). So, as Sublight says, a viewer in those countries is going to need access to a premium service somehow.

What percentage of the Chinese population have access to ESPN Star? Is it 11% or greater? And why should we believe that they care about the SB, given that our good Neighbors to the North can only scrounge up a <10% viewership despite increased access, favorable timing and cultural resonance?

I do agree with you about something, however: the professor in BobT’s link either has horrible research methodology or was badly misquoted. I’d believe 2.5 billion viewers for the Rugby World Cup over all of the games in the final rounds in South Africa in 1995, if we count multiple games viewed by a single individual (as we’re doing for the MLB season in this thread). The RWC is a true “World Cup” in that dozens of countries compete in the qualifying rounds before going through to the final rounds against the “powerhouse countries”.

As for cricket: well, Indians and Pakistanis (amongst others) tend to be passionate about the sport. That’s over four times the total US population just from those two countries.

25

They don’t even need that many. If the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, and Braves get millions of viewers per game, the small-market teams need much fewer than 420,000 per game to maintain the average. I seriously doubt that the Super Bowl could outdraw the entire baseball season, esp. since baseball is popular all over Latin America as well as in Japan and Korea.

(“much fewer”? Is there a better way to say that?)

26

Remember that the professor who was quoted in my link was just quoted in a press release. He likely has a better explanation of his numbers in the book that was being flacked.

27

If we run on the assumption that the baseball playoffs draw 200 million viewers (obviously many of the same actual people over and over, but admissable under these rules, yes), the regular season for baseball still needs to come up with 600 million, and I doubt they do. Just judging from my own city, which is the 4th or 5th biggest TV market in the nation, baseball is on a UHF station and draws small enough ratings that local advertisers can afford the time. Most baseball teams are in small enough markets (some of which are even split , like the Bay Area or Chicago)that 150,000 or so viewers for any single game is a gross overexpectation, let alone averaging that the whole season over 160 times.

National ratings for nationally broadcast featured games (i.e. cherry picking the good teams on ideal weekend sports time slots) has been pulling in something like a 2.7 rating. NASCAR has been doubling that. So I rather doubt the Devil Rays - Rockies games are pulling down big numbers… Remember also that most baseball teams are pretty well clearly out of the playoff picture in a realistic snese for the last weeks of the season, which isn’t helping baseball ratings any.

I don’t know why people are assuming that you need to be from an Anglo culture or actually play the sport to watch it once a year. It’s a spectacle, it features people like McCartney, U2, Britney Spears, the malfunctioning Ms. Jackson, etc. it has production values that most TV in the world isn’t budgeted for… It’s a draw, if only as a freakshow.

28

These numbers are from a 1998 article, I imagine things have grown since then: there were 3,000 journalists covering the SB in '98, and over 400 of them were from abroad. Now, if people don’t care about the event in other countries, why go through the expense and bother of sending hundreds of reporters to cover the event?

It appears, by the way that the Washington Nationals aren’t being broadcast in the DC area at all.. I can’t imagine that the Expos were exactly drawing 150,000 viewers a game either. For every Yankees or Braves, there’s at least one or two teams that have trouble getting people to wtch at all.

29

Actually, television stations are required to provide a certain number of slots to local advertisers. Have you never seen a cheesy local ad during the Super Bowl?

Further on the point of all this number crunching, the discussion has now seemed to evolved into comparing MLB viewers in the US, to SB viewers worldwide. We’ve already shown that there are 150M viewers in the USA and I think a full season of MLB can beat that hands down. Actually, it seems that the combined World Series viewers can beat that without a problem. The worldwide question is a different one. I’ll tell you one thing [warning: statistics coming out of ass] there are probably more people in Japan that watch any single Mariners and Yankees game than the superbowl. Trust me, the Japanese don’t give a rat’s ass about football but they care very dearly for (even American) baseball. Note how they come out in force to vote for the all-star team.

30

Keep up the thinking guys, it really is helping. As for the teams who aren’t so popular in their tv markets, remember teams like the Cubs (my personal favorite) are shown on cable television for their fans across the country. When I lived in Denver I could watch any Cub game broadcast on WGN because that channel was carried in Denver. Same goes for the Braves on TBS, since that is also a common nationwide cable channel. I think that is what makes it so difficult to track MLB viewership.

31

Exactly. Last night, I could watch the Braves-Marlins game on TBS, Pirates-Padres on FSN Pittsburgh, and A’s-Orioles on ESPN. I actually watched parts of all three games as well, as well as listening to some of the play-by-play of the Dodgers-Giants game. With basic cable, I can almost always find a game to watch on any given day. It might be the Braves or the Pirates or whatever is being shown on ESPN or Fox, but I can find at least one game if I want.

32

Can’t say I specifically recall that, no. The closest would be promo/tie-ins for local news, which are in any event network affiliates. But Jimmy’s Used Auto Parts or Tastykake or something like that? Not that I can ever recall.

33

Ad time for the Super Bowl does cost a lot. I would think that the networks give the affiliates a couple spots during the many hours they are on. But that time still would cost a lot

34

I can add some hard numbers to MLB in 2004:
73,022,969 saw the games in person (& as to who is/isn’t a Baseball town: more than 1 in 10 were in greater LA).

http://redsox.bostonherald.com/otherMLB/view.bg?articleid=75597&format=text

The average TV audience of the World Series was 25.4 million viewers per game

http://www.noticias.info/Archivo/2004/200410/20041029/20041029_38138.shtm

So you have about 174 Million from attendance and the World Series

Approximately 44 million viewers watched the Yankees on their cable network. According to the chest pounding self-congratulatory press release this number is 40% more than no.2 : the Cubs.
http://www.yesnetwork.com/network/news.asp?news_id=642

So we are talking veiwership of 70 million for Teams no.1 and no.2 (26.4 million if we believe the press release and none of the rest of the teams exceed 26million) coming to 240 million for the WS, Playoffs & the Yankees, Cubs and MLB attendance … **if ** we accept 800 million I say the NFL truimphalists are right – but I don’t have the patience to run down all the MLB teams to give that a 100% CERTAIN GQTM answer

35

I believe we need Cecil’s help on this one.

36

Those numbers seem to be for the US only. The crucial point of the “Super Bowl boosters” side is that whereas viewership in the US is about 150 million, 650 million watch it elsewhere. Several posters, myself included, are skeptical about the latter part of this.

Given that there clearly is evidence for serious baseball fandom outside the US, it would seem really important to include non-US viewers of the MLB and WS (especially in those countries that have “native sons” playing for US baseball teams).

37

According to this pdf from MLB International, Major League games were broadcast in 224 different countries in 2004. Actual viewership numbers are vague (can’t really tell if they’re talking per-game or total), but they do mention that in Japan over 250 games were shown (mainly Mariners and Yankees, with a number of Mets as well, along with all the post-season games), with the top draw being Game 7 of the Red Sox - Yankees playoff series, with 11 million viewers. If only a tenth as many people watched the other games, that’s over 250 million more viewers total for the year.

38

jimmmy, it was just about TV viewership, not game attendance.

As to the bet, I don’t buy it.

So we have 101.6 million from four World Series games, 44 million Yankees viewers, and 26.4 million Cubs viewers. That leaves 2,268 other regular season games and a minimum of 20 postseason games. For the MLB to get to 800 million viewers, 274,476 people need to watch each of those games. Between games on national TV and each other local market, plus the overseas stuff, I think they can beat that.

39

This also argues against the 800 million figure. If we assume that the number of journalists from a country is proportional to the number of people in that country who are watching, then we conclude that U. S. viewers are 6.5 times more numerous than foreign viewers. U. S. viewers certainly do not number above 300 million, that being the population of the country, which would argue that foreign viewers amount to less than 50 million, for a total of less than half of the claimed 800 million. With that press coverage, 800 million viewers would require that other countries have at least ten times as many viewers per reporters than do Americans, more probably 20 times.

Any way you slice it, the figure of 800 million watching the Superbowl cannot possibly be correct.

40

Why would we assume that? For one thing, whereas the US has 4 major broadcast networks, a lot of countries have one. That’s that many fewer journalists to send. The costs involved in sending people to the US - plane fare, in most cases far higher costs for food and lodging than you have at home - are much higher to most foreign news agencies than they are for our own. This is quite some level of expense and effort if no one in these other countries cares.

Not only is it cheaper and easier for American reporters to get to the SB, but the numbers are skewed by at least 2 self-interested media markets who have teams there, and are sending one or more journalists from just about every media outlet to cover the game.

At the time of the 1998 journalist figures I quoted, the SB was broadcast to 160+ countries, but now that figure is 220. I imagine the number of foreign journalists has risen correspondingly. I would also ask the question “If foreign viewership is that low, why does the broadcast go to more and more places every year?” Someone’s making money from advertising dollars on this, and advertisers don’t pay unless they expect viewership. 60 more countries in 7 years indicates to me someone finds this successful.

Anyone know how many countries the NBA finals, World Series or NHL finals are braodcast in? Anywhere close to 220? We’ve already determined that those are more popular sports outside of the country, no question. But I argue the SB isn’t drawing as a sport so much as a spectacle.