While average minute audience tends to dominate conversations, a broadcast’s total reach is also significant. For Super Bowl LIX, the Fox/Fox Deportes/Telemundo broadcast saw a major boost thanks to a new Nielsen measurement, making it the highest-reach broadcast in history.
The measurement company announced Friday that the Super Bowl’s U.S. reach (viewers who watched at least one minute) across those broadcasts was actually 191.1 million viewers. That’s up 8.3 million from their initial announcement of 182.8 million viewers.
The NFL’s Super Bowl LIX, broadcast on FOX, FOX Deportes and Telemundo and streamed on Tubi and NFL digital properties, continues to set new marks. According to Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel “Reach” methodology, Super Bowl LIX reached a record 191.1 million unique viewers who watched the game for at least 1 minute. As previously announced, Super Bowl LIX also averaged a record high 127.7 million viewers on February 9, using the Average Minute Audience Metric across the entirety of the game, using Nielsen’s Panel only metric.
…Super Bowl LIX’s reach of 191.1 million viewers, surpassing the comparable reach of 182.2 million viewers by Super Bowl LVIII last year, makes this the highest reported reach in Super Bowl history.
Of course, there are some caveats to that. Nielsen notes that this was the first time Super Bowl reach was calculated using the Big Data + Panel reach methodology. It was previously calculated with their Total Audience measurement, which they retired in January once their Big Data + Panel approach received Media Rating Council accreditation.
In addition, Super Bowl LIX came with Nielsen tracking out-of-home viewership across 100 percent of the U.S., up from 66 percent the previous year. Of course, how ratings are measured now is dramatically different from previous decades, so any discussion of all-time highs needs to keep that in mind. Even the lower initial reach number here was 600,000 ahead of last year’s 182.2 million, which itself was a record, so this is definitely a new record.
Still, it does come under a different measurement system.
None of this changes the average minute audience figure, which remains at the previously announced record of 127.7 million (and was confidently clear of last year’s record of 123.7 million even before final numbers). So, this doesn’t mean more people watched the Super Bowl minute-by-minute. But it does mean that, as per Nielsen’s numbers, even more people in the U.S. tuned in to at least part of the Super Bowl.
This is crucial for the NFL, which is deeply invested in maximizing its audience. In the past, the league has emphasized expanding its reach, as seen in Nielsen surveys, including one from 2023 that claimed a reach of 200 million. However, Nielsen’s in-house reach numbers remain the gold standard, especially for advertisers. Even with the new measurement method, the change in these numbers is significant for multiple reasons.