Super Bowl LVII most-watched Super Bowl of all time (2024)

There’s a new leader for the most-watched Super Bowl of all time — at least according to Fox Sports.

On Tuesday, the network said Super Bowl LVII that aired on Feb. 12, drew an average audience of 115.1 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes and digital streaming, according to updated numbers from Nielsen Media Research.

That’s 2.1 million more than the 113 million viewers initially reported after the game, making it the most-watched Super Bowl of all time, topping the 114.4 million viewers who watched New England dramatically win Super Bowl XLIX on NBC in 2015. (The average audience has long been used to determine the most-watched game as opposed to the peak audience.)

The new viewership mark also puts Kansas City’s 38-35 comeback win over Philadelphia up two percent over the Rams’ victory over the Bengals in 2022 (112.3 million viewers).

It also means Super Bowl LVII is the most-watched program in American TV history. (Note: Apples-to-apples historical comparisons have become somewhat irrelevant given streaming and additive platforms.)

Here’s what you need to know:

What happened?

Without getting into the mind-boggling complexities of how TV viewership is measured, Nielsen mistakenly attributed more than a million viewers to an internal (non-public) NFL Network live feed of the game that should have been encoded as Fox viewers. During its internal probe of that issue, which the NFL itself requested, Nielsen discovered an out-of-home (OOH) viewership error that subsequently added another million viewers to the final total. OOH, like traditional at-home viewing, is measured by audio signals embedded in every broadcast that Nielsen equipment registers.

Like with the NFL Network, some of the Super Bowl OOH audience was mistakenly categorized, said Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ executive vice president, head of strategy and analytics. Hence, a chunk of OOH audience wasn’t reflected in the initial viewership totals publicized the day after the broadcast. Nielsen alerted Fox and the NFL once it realized a mistake occurred.

“That they discovered it completely on their own. They proactively brought it to our attention, completely owned the error,” Mulvihill said.

Nielsen recalculated its data over the past couple of months to arrive at the new Super Bowl LVII audience average.

Why does this matter?

As a consumer, it doesn’t matter to you on a practical level. You are going to watch the Super Bowl no matter what the viewership is from previous years. The market is such that the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl is going to get ad rate increases regardless of what the viewership was the year before. (For most championships, you sell against how the event did the previous year, but the Super Bowl is the rare event where ad buys go up every year.) So it really comes down to an optics play for the network as well as the NFL. The league can market, as Fox will here, that they had the biggest average audience in Super Bowl history. That’s a splashy top line for marketing purposes and that’s what you’ll see Fox do. — Deitsch

Does Fox get more money for having a bigger audience?

No. “There really aren’t financial implications,” Mulvihill said. “There are no opportunities to extract more money out of these revised numbers.”

That’s because Super Bowl advertising, despite topping $7 million for a half-minute of airtime, doesn’t include guaranteed viewership numbers for advertisers. In other words, brands get the eyeballs that they get during the game. Even with an adjustment of a couple of million viewers, the Super Bowl audience is so large that such ebbs and flows are not big needle movers. — Shea

So it’s pride and marketing?

Mostly, but not entirely. Outside of network executives and their sports league partners, along with advertisers, media buyers, and a handful of media reporters, TV viewership metrics aren’t generally important to fans and viewers. But the Super Bowl audience numbers have long been a watercooler topic, even among casual fans. “The Super Bowl viewership is really the only Nielsen statistic in a given year that is part of the historical record,” Mulvihill said. “You want to make sure you’ve got it right.”

Fox also had a banner year for major events, such as the men’s World Cup and college football audiences, and an NFL Thanksgiving game setting the all-time regular-season viewership record. Going into the record books (at least for now) with the most-watched program in the history of American television is logically a point of pride at Fox. “It’s the capstone of a year we thought was pretty special,” Mulvihill said. “It’s something everybody that worked on the Super Bowl can feel good about.” — Shea

Are there caveats to any network boasting about a record TV audience?

Of course! Viewership totals before summer 2020 didn’t include out-of-home viewership, which adds about 10 percent or more to an NFL game’s eyeball haul, and in the case of the Super Bowl can be an even larger segment — particularly as fans (and casual watchers interested more in the showcase of commercials) gather to watch at friend’s homes. What that means is Super Bowls prior to 2022 likely had more people watching than the official numbers reflect. Ultimately, Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 may still be the biggest domestic TV audience of all time, but we’ll never know. — Shea

What does this mean for Nielsen?

Nielsen, which is trying to create modern metrics to reflect both linear and streaming viewership, has taken its lumps over the years as the TV industry’s only provider of a common currency of audience numbers – its ability to deliver granular demographic data since the early 1950s remains unmatched even as alternative digital efforts try to do just that. “It underscores the incredible complexity of the job they do every day. It’s never more complicated than it is on Super Bowl Sunday,” Mulvihill said. “I give them a lot of credit for being fully transparent with us.”

Nielsen is investigating to see if any other programming may have been affected by the OOH coding error.

“We strive to meet the highest standards for transparency and accuracy in audience measurement,” Nielsen said in a statement to The Athletic. “The Super Bowl continues to be a unique media event in terms of its size and diversity in how audiences watch the game. We appreciate the support and collaboration from our partners at FOX and the NFL to correct previously unknown errors to ultimately provide a more accurate measure for this year’s total audience for the game. —Shea

Required reading

• New NFL study shows even larger Super Bowl audience, but does it really matter?

(Photo: Adam Bow / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)