The NFL’s Thanksgiving tripleheader audience was undercounted by a lot, according to new joint study done by the NFL and Nielsen. Viewership for the three Thanksgiving games on CBS, Fox and NBC could be as much as 31% higher than previously reported, notes SBJ’s Austin Karp. This discrepancy underscores the difficulties in counting audiences on days where large gatherings occur, like Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Super Bowl.
The survey found that the three games should have averaged 44.1 million viewers, which would be well above the TV+streaming numbers reported by the two parties late last month, which was 33.6 million. The numbers highlight leagues' complaints that viewing numbers for big sports events remains underreported.
The Thanksgiving Day audience gains are even greater than the ones found in a similar study for the Super Bowl earlier this year, said Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer. Commissioner Roger Goodell is “passionate” about getting to as accurate a figure as possible on such telecasts, Ballew said.
Other leagues would benefit from these types of studies, like the NBA during Christmas Day or MLB on July 4. The NFL could consider repeating this study around it’s Week 1 games, Ballew said. But even with three games on Christmas this year, the NFL does not plan to conduct this kind of audience study.
The custom survey consisted of 5,800 U.S. homes and was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago using the AmeriSpeak panel. The study examined the size of viewing groups determined whether those groups are larger than the ones Nielsen counts today.
