'Super Bowl ratings: Major drop in TV viewership, major surge online'
'You knew something was up when CBS didn’t release its preliminary Super Bowl ratings on Monday afternoon as usual.
The Super Bowl is always the most-watched television event of any year, so each year it’s a matter of whether the numbers will match the prior year … and what to say in the event they don’t. When the numbers didn’t show up, veteran media observers speculated that the league and CBS were doing all they could to spin bad news into good.
As it turns out, that’s pretty much what happened. CBS’s Tuesday morning press release announcing the viewership employed a symphony of creative language and selective statistics, referencing a “total audience” of 96.4 million viewers, which includes both online and TV viewers. (Most releases openly tout the number of TV viewers, then add online over the top of that.)
Sports Business Journal reported that the actual number of viewers who tuned into CBS was 91.629 million, a 9 percent drop from last season’s 100.45 million and the lowest TV viewership since 2006 (Steelers over Seahawks). This game and Super Bowl LIII (Patriots over Rams, 98.48 million) were the only games since 2009 not to crack nine-figure TV viewership marks.
This decline was obvious from the early returns. Only nine of the top 44 markets showed increases over 2020’s game. Top markets were, unsurprisingly, Kansas City, Boston and Tampa Bay.'
https://sports.yahoo.com/super-bowl-ratings-major-drop-in-tv-viewership-major-surge-online-153323808.html
Stop following the 'stars'