Super Bowl: How much viewership the game has might surprise you

Ratings game

Not everyone is a football fan, but the Super Bowl is the most watched program and has been for 20 years. Here’s a look at TV trends.

You can find a list of the top 100 most-watched shows in 2023 here.

Top 100

Live sports dominated the top 100 prime-time shows. In 2023, 56 slots went to sports — broken down as 45 NFL games, six for the NBA Finals, three for the NCAA Basketball Tournament, one for college football and one for Fox’s “The OT” NFL postgame show.

The ads

Fox will receive about $7 million for each 30-second commercial during the 2024 Super Bowl, up about $500,000 from last year. There are typically 80 to 90 commercials during the game.

Audience universe

Thanks to technology and TV-connected devices, viewers have more ways to watch programming than ever. Television is still the preferred method, but even that has changed as people are watching more and more shows on time-shifted TV (such as digital recordings) and online.The chart to the right shows Nielsen estimates for the monthly U.S. audience across a spectrum of devices.

Household ownership of devices: Nielsen’s National Television Household Universe estimated there are 119.6 million TV homes in the U.S., and 58.7% have a device capable of streaming content to the television set.

A breakdown is shown at right.

Total viewers: Estimated to be 304.5 million (age 2 and up), an increase of 0.9% from 2016.

Sports and drama: 14% of total TV viewing is of sporting events, and most of them are viewed live, whereas more than half of TV drama is recorded and watched later.

Sources: Variety.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Nielsen Co., Consumer Electronics Association, Bloomberg Media