Why does the Super Bowl lose 18-49 demographics?

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

This year’s game reached 96.4 million viewers, the lowest score since 2007. There are all sorts of theories as to why the number was so low. The game was not close. This season was strange due to the pandemic. Musical guest The Weeknd was not a draw in the half.

But none of this reaches the flesh of the subject. Below are the Super Bowl scores for 18- to 49-year-olds, the first demographics for advertisers, over the past ten years.

Part of the decline is related to the increase in transmission, which is not collected in Nielsen data (but it will be in 2024). But not so much. Some 5.7 million people aired the Super Bowl this year, up from 3.4 million last year, according to The Streamable.

Forget the blast game and the weird show in the middle. Whether it’s an exciting comeback from Tom Brady against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, a magnificent quarterback from Patrick Muhammad against the San Francisco 49ers in 2020, or from Brady vs. Muhammad this year, it doesn’t matter. Every year there are fewer people under the age of 50 watching it.

Maybe football is not as popular as before. Perhaps younger viewers are turned off by Colin Kaepernick’s league handling or concussions or super-long games full of publicity.

But those arguments are less convincing if you look at the ratings from 18 to 49 “Sunday Night Football,” which have been remarkably consistent in recent years, until this season full of pandemics.

A unique September and October in life, where all major sports were done at the same time, may have brought down the “Sunday Night Football” ranking of 2020. We’ll have to see if 2021 returns to 2019 levels.

But the previous three years show that there are a lot of football fans who were still tuning in every week.

This suggests that the steady decline in Super Bowl scores is not happening because every year there are fewer football fans. On the contrary, it’s because fewer casual fans and non-sporting spectators are tuning in.

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

This speaks to an essential change in the American media and has been noticed for years. Think of those “Game of Thrones” rehearsals a couple of years ago that reflected on whether it would be the last show the Americans watched together.

The material 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 can never be the cultural experience it was before.

Here are several ironies.

When the pandemic began and the NBA and MLB delayed their seasons, sports fans assumed that people would desperately return to live sports once they resumed, both as a lifesaver to normalcy and how to do it. after months of watching recorded schedules.

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

This may also explain the sudden drop in “Sunday Night Football” viewership this year and, in general, the sporting vision of 2020. In contrast, hours of play and Netflix subscriptions have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Etsy revenue has skyrocketed. So are pet adoptions.

But these free-fall hearings have not affected Super Bowl trade rates, which have risen each year to a higher level this year at about $ 5.5 million per 30-second spot. The Super Bowl may be an unraveling iceberg, but it remains by far the most watched event of the year (including the 18-49 age group). In addition, “Sunday Night Football” remains the most-watched program for 18- to 49-year-olds year after year.

The fractured media environment will also not stop ViacomCBS, Disney, Comcast and Fox from paying billions of dollars more for NFL renewal fees, agreements that could be reached in weeks. In total, the NFL can get $ 100 billion from the networks over the next ten years.

“If we sat here today and just did a 20-year NFL renewal, and you asked me what was on my mind, I would renew the NFL in 21 years,” said Eric Shanks, head of Fox Sports 2018.

This is an American medium in a nutshell.

Inherited media are poised to spend more and more on programming as they contemplate data that suggests Americans, en masse, want less and less. They try to modify their businesses for digital consumption, but they can only play the cards they have.

That doesn’t even explain the under-18 audience. When children grow up in a parentless environment who religiously read the newspaper’s sports page or tune into ESPN’s SportsCenter, the overall cultural relevance of sports is in jeopardy, especially when they have commercially free Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite.

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

This includes companies such as FanDuel and DraftKings. Even Disney, a company that long considered the game to be anathema to its family brand, is hot on the idea of ​​betting. Still, Disney CEO Bob Chapek noted this week that he believes sports betting is appealing to fans rather than casual ones.

“It’s particularly appealing to younger, passionate sports audiences,” Chapek said of sports games during his company’s Thursday earnings call. “We see the value in it.”

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

It’s easier to imagine that the shared experience of American television will slowly fade away.

SEE: Disney saw strong growth in pay-per-view streaming subscribers during the first quarter