The NFL swelled with pride Sunday with the technological success it had in distributing one of its 256 regular-season games on the internet through a partnership with Yahoo. That game, Buffalo versus Jacksonville in London on Sunday morning, drew a total of 33.6 million “streams,” according to Yahoo and the NFL, and 15.2 million unique visitors.
But what we learned later on Monday diminished the impressiveness of those statistics, and resulted in a bait-and-switch feeling to the original numbers trumpeted by the NFL and Yahoo. A stream actually counted if viewers stayed on the game for more than three seconds. And in order to buttress the overall numbers, Sports Business Journal reported, anyone who clicked on Yahoo’s web page once the game kicked off had the game start on autoplay, resulting in a “stream,” whether the visitor had any intention of watching the game or not. In other words, anyone who landed on Yahoo.com between 9:30 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. Sunday, unless he or she was remarkably nimble and could leave the site in less than three seconds after logging on, was counted as someone who “streamed” the football game. That lands somewhere between disingenuous and outright misleading by Yahoo and the NFL.
The way American television networks judge an audience for a game is by something called “minute ratings,” which measure the ratings of a telecast minute by minute over the course of the entire game. The ratings bodies take the total number of minutes of the game—say, 180 minutes for a three-hour game—and divide that by the number of viewers minute-by-minute. That’s a good measure of who watched the game, and for how long.
In the U.S., Sports Business Journal reported, the “minute rating” for Bills-Jaguars was 1.64 million viewers, though that does not include the over-the-air TV rating of viewers from Buffalo and Jacksonville markets, which got the game on local network affiliates, the only markets to be able to see the game on home television.
The previous Sunday morning London game this season—Dolphins vs. Jets in Week 4—dwarfed the rating of Sunday’s game. According to Nielsen, that game had 9.86 million viewers.
And not to confuse you … but comparing a game broadcast on television in the No. 1 and No. 16 markets in the country—New York and South Florida (total TV households: 9.03 million)—to a game on the internet between two struggling teams in the No. 47 and No. 53 markets—Jacksonville and Buffalo (1.25 million households)—is fraught with inequities, to put it mildly. Suffice it to say, a game on TV in 9 million TV households should crush a game streamed on computers between two of the NFL’s bottom four markets.
Not that ratings were the driver of why the NFL experimented with Buffalo-Jacksonville on the internet. This was primarily the NFL announcing: “Hey, we’ve got a real game on at 9:30 Sunday morning, and log on to Yahoo.com to see it instead of watching your TV,” and judging whether, technologically, the web could handle it. And it could. In markets where the internet was shaky, the picture was shaky. In markets like mine (Manhattan) the picture was mostly vivid. And it was also about seeing whether those around the world would log on and appreciate it. My take, from e-mailers to The MMQB, is that the global village appreciated the free look at the NFL, though many already had the ability to see games in some way or another.
So I still believe it was a success, but I do think the NFL and Yahoo should have leveled with consumers regarding the real numbers of how many people watched the game.
To read more visit Peter King’s MMQB which originally published this story
Jason Barrett is the President and Founder of Barrett Media since the company was created in September 2015. Prior to its arrival, JB served as a sports radio programmer, launching brands such as 95.7 The Game in San Francisco, and 101 ESPN in St. Louis. He also spent time programming SportsTalk 950 in Philadelphia, 590 The Fan KFNS in St. Louis, and ESPN 1340/1390 in Poughkeepsie, NY. Jason also worked on-air and behind the scenes in local radio at 101.5 WPDH, WTBQ 1110AM, and WPYX 106.5. He also spent two years on the national stage, producing radio shows for ESPN Radio in Bristol, CT. Among them included the Dan Patrick Show, and GameNight.
You can find JB on Twitter @SportsRadioPD. He’s also reachable by email at Jason@BarrettMedia.com.
