(Stock image via Pixabay, Graphic by The Desk)
(Stock image via Pixabay, Graphic by The Desk)
Google’s streaming video platform YouTube grabbed 17 million football fans with its exclusive global telecast of a National Football League (NFL) game played in Brazil last week, the service said in a statement on Monday.
The game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Chargers marked the first time an NFL game was carried solely on YouTube. The stream averaged 17.3 million viewers worldwide, according to figures released by Google, which included internal data and viewership figures from Nielsen.
Nearly all viewers were based in the United States, according to a breakdown of viewership figures by Google. More than 16 million viewers watched stateside, while 1.1 million viewers watched from other countries — apparently including Brazil, where the game was played.
Google said fans from more than 230 countries tuned in to watch some or all of the game. The company also said it was the biggest live-streamed event on the platform to date, shattering the record for the biggest concurrent audience for a single broadcast.
Google partnered with the NFL to integrate creator-driven content throughout the broadcast, with exclusive appearances from some of YouTube’s biggest digital personalities like Mr. Beast, Haley Kalil, Michelle Khare and Marques Brownlee. NFL veterans Cam Newton, Derek Carr, Brandon Marshall and Tyrann Mathieu participated in pre-game and post-game hosting duties.
Latin pop star Karol G headlined the halftime show, while creators including IShowSpeed, Tom Grossi, Robegrill, SKabeche and CazéTV participated in “Watch With” companion streams.
The matchup itself was historic, marking the first NFL regular-season game held in Brazil. The Chiefs went on to defeat the Chargers 28-21.
The NFL has experimented with delivering Friday afternoon and evening games in the past. In recent years, the league has offered Black Friday games through Amazon’s Prime Video, which attracted nearly 12 million viewers last year.
YouTube and the NFL have a long-standing relationship that includes licensing rights to NFL highlights and the distribution of NFL Network, NFL RedZone and the NFL Sunday Ticket.
Before YouTube streamed its first-ever exclusive NFL game from Brazil on Friday night, other league broadcast partners were voicing frustration over how the event will be counted by Nielsen.
Senior analytics executives at Fox and ESPN publicly criticized Nielsen’s plan to use a custom audience measurement for the Chiefs-Chargers game from Brazil.
“Nielsen’s measurement of tonight’s YouTube game will not be made available to other Nielsen clients, a flagrant departure from Nielsen’s history of transparency and a slap in the face to longstanding clients,” Mike Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at Fox Sports, wrote in a post on X last Friday. “When it comes to streamers, the rules simply don’t apply.”
Mulvihill added that Nielsen’s strength comes from “impartiality and transparency,” and suggested that deviating from those standards erodes trust in the company’s data.
Minutes later, ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Research Flora Kelly posted her own critique of Nielsen’s approach.
“With the start of football comes Nielsen changes — Big Data, new times, etc. — and the latest wrinkle: a custom methodology Nielsen created for YouTube’s NFL game,” Kelly wrote. “Not the same approach as the rest of us, nor [Media Rating Council] accredited. Conclusion: Their rating is not a fair comp.”
According to reporting by Front Office Sports, Nielsen used a bespoke measurement process for YouTube due to timing issues. The streaming platform did not have enough time to provide the audience inputs needed for Nielsen’s newly-accredited Big Data + Panel system, which combines panel-based ratings with first-party streaming information.
Instead, Friday’s numbers more-closely resembled the methodology Nielsen used for Amazon’s Thursday Night Football streams in 2023, before the Big Data + Panel system gained accreditation earlier this year.
The NFL has also criticized Nielsen’s measurement tools in recent weeks, with one executive saying its legacy panels product under-represented television audience figures in the past, and that the company was slow to embrace streaming and first-party data.
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