Update: YouTube and Nielsen clarified the viewership numbers for the game on Friday, reporting a global AMA of 19.7 million viewers, a U.S. AMA of 18.5 million and an international AMA of 1.2 million. The discrepancy was due to an internal technical issue on YouTube’s end.
The NFL’s latest experiment with a new platform has paid off, with YouTube’s São Paulo-based Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Los Angeles Chargers game bringing in a global average minute audience (AMA) of 17.3 million viewers, which it said was the most concurrent viewers for a live stream in the service’s history.
But the game in Brazil was more than just another bet on a different platform. The NFL’s experiment was a way for the league to expand to a younger and more globalized audience while testing out free-to-watch games on a larger scale. YouTube is by far the biggest platform that the NFL has used to stream a free game, dwarfing rivals Tubi and Peacock.
“It was a brilliant move by YouTube to lock in that content,” Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited, told TheWrap. He also sees it as a “smart move” on the NFL’s part. “It’s just another audience extension that’s taking place.”
For the NFL, YouTube marks the biggest extension of its reach, given the platform’s massive global footprint. YouTube is estimated to have 2.5 billion monthly active users, reaching nearly half of all Internet users, according to analytics firm DemandSage.
“The game on YouTube on Friday will probably be the most accessible NFL game ever produced because all you need is access to the Internet,” Jeff Miller, executive vice president of communications and public policy for the NFL, said in a press conference ahead of the season. “That’s been a cornerstone of the NFL distribution media model for as long as anybody here can remember because we want to make sure that fans get access to our games and get access on the platforms and the devices that they choose.”
But not everyone left Friday pleased with the results. Nielsen’s decision to provide YouTube with customized audience analysis for the game ruffled the feathers of several broadcast partners, who expressed concerns that the data wasn’t on an even playing field.
The way that Nielsen delivered that data accentuated an ongoing problem in the industry: as streaming becomes more of the norm, consistent and reliable audience measurement tools are becoming more valuable — and harder to come by — than ever before.
A spokesman for YouTube declined to comment on concerns over the audience measurement data.
An unreliable viewership comparison
Though the Chiefs vs. Chargers game may be where the future is heading, the debate around just how well it performed underscores the lack of consistent measurement data.
Anyone who covers streaming regularly is intimately familiar with this problem. Netflix’s definition of a viewer is different from Hulu’s definition, meaning that most conversations about viewership can feel like trying to compare apples to oranges. That’s why third-party measurement companies are so vital in the era of streaming, and none of these companies is more respected than Nielsen.
But for the YouTube game, Nielsen provided a custom analysis that was only delivered to the company, a person familiar with the plans told TheWrap. YouTube’s NFL game marked the first time Nielsen had ever measured YouTube viewership for a specific live event. Because YouTube did not have enough time to create the specific audience inputs for Nielsen’s workflow to calculate first-party streaming data, a custom analysis was provided, the person said.
It was a measure taken because of how difficult and time-consuming it is to deliver accurate audience measurement. But that means the performance of YouTube’s first free NFL game comes with an asterisk. And the NFL’s broadcast partners are frustrated by this decision.
Mike Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics for Fox Sports, tweeted about the model on Friday, calling it a “flagrant departure from Nielsen’s history of transparency” and a “slap in the face” to the company’s clients. “When it comes to streamers, the rules simply don’t apply.”
Flora Kelly, the senior vice president of ESPN research, also posted about the customized model, tweeting that it was “not the same approach as the rest of us, nor MRC accredited.”
“Their rating is not a fair comp,” Kelly concluded.
Though YouTube’s game can’t be an exact comparison because of that custom model, it performed on par with the streaming viewership the NFL has seen in the past. Throughout the 2024 season, Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football saw an average viewership of 13.2 million viewers, compared to YouTube’s 17.3 million viewers. A reported 16.2 million of YouTube’s AMA viewers came from the U.S. while the remaining 1.1 million AMA viewers came from abroad.
This number may be higher than Prime Video’s average and higher than the 13.6 million AMA Tubi saw for the Super Bowl, but it doesn’t touch the peaks the NFL has seen on streaming. Prime Video’s most-streamed game to date was its 2024 Wild Card matchup between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens, which brought in an average minute audience of 22.1 million viewers.
As for Netflix, the Chiefs vs. Steelers game hit 30 million AMA, and the Ravens vs. Texans game hit 31.3 million AMA, according to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel. These numbers represented global viewership for these games. As for U.S. viewership, the streamer’s two exclusive Christmas Day games averaged 26.5 million viewers.
Unlike Netflix or Prime, however, you don’t need a subscription to watch the YouTube game.
Bringing in a younger, globalized audience
The NFL hasn’t been shy about wanting to bring in a more global audience. Just like Prime Video’s Thursday night games or Netflix’s Christmas Day games, the league’s partnership with YouTube does just that.
It’s just the latest in a string of deals going back to 2016, when the NFL sublicensed the digital streaming rights to Thursday Night Football to Twitter before striking a deal with Prime Video a year later. By 2021, Prime Video became the exclusive home for Thursday Night Football, and in 2023, Peacock entered the arena, airing the Buffalo Bills vs. Los Angeles Chargers game that year. The NFL then doubled down on streaming last year with Netflix’s exclusive Christmas Day games, which was the first part of a three-year deal with the league.
“The streamers kind of check the box really nicely,” Shirin Malkani, co-chair of the sports group at Perkins Cole, told TheWrap. Because streamers have already invested in local markets around the world, partnering with them solves several problems for the NFL. Rather than the league having to build relationships with broadcasters in São Paulo and figuring out which commentators would resonate with that market, YouTube took on those problems.
The Chiefs vs. Chargers game also repositioned one of the NFL’s international games into an event in and of itself. The first international game happened in 2007 between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants. Ever since, these games have taken place occasionally throughout the seasons, but were often treated as more of a novelty than a primetime event. By bringing in Colombian singer Karol G to perform the halftime show and recruiting several big names to get involved, YouTube transformed the Chiefs vs. Chargers game into a more monumental occasion.
Most of those big names seem specifically chosen to draw in Gen Z viewers, another goal the league has been transparent about. In addition to bringing in veterans like Rich Eisen to comment and announce, YouTube tapped several content creators like Deestroying (6.3 million subscribers) to contribute to coverage. The platform also partnered with four creators — iShowSpeed (43.3 million subscribers on YouTube), Tom Grossi (861,000 subscribers), Robegrill (4.15 million subscribers) and SKabeche (13.7 million subscribers) — giving them the rights to provide their own commentary to their subscribers through YouTube’s Watch With functionality.
Partnering with these creators gives the NFL an avenue to connect to younger audiences as well as another way to localize. As seen through NFL’s Creator of the Week program, the league often partners with YouTube creators who are influential in their specific regions, giving a hometown touch to coverage. These creators also allow both YouTube and the NFL to monetize games in more diverse ways. Now it’s not unusual for the league to partner with food influencers like The Golden Balance or creators that specialize in fantasy sports like Peter Overzet.
“The league gets a cut. The creator gets a cut. The platform gets a cut of brand new revenue streams and a new audience. I really do think it’s smart,” Malkani, who previously worked with the NBA for seven years, said. “I imagine, in the not too distant future, you’re going to have multiple alternate creator casts for any one game with different perspectives.”
The value of fan data
There is another massive benefit to the NFL’s partnership with streamers: data. Consumer data is likely the most valuable asset from these deals for platforms like YouTube and Prime Video, which incentivizes these platforms to keep NFL games free to watch with commercials. Meanwhile, increased buy-in from platforms with a large global audience is exactly the sort of partnership the NFL seems to want.
GroupM, now known as WPP, forecasted that connected TV ad revenue was set to increase by 12.9% this year and overtake linear by 2029. Since CTV is still a relatively underutilized market, advertising spend can go a bit further than spends on linear television. CTV ad spends also reach more eyeballs, as Nielsen reported in August that streaming accounted for nearly half of all TV viewership. Streaming platforms also allow for more personalized and targeted ads as the companies can use the data they’ve collected to better serve their advertising partners.
“Google has more data than anybody,” Lynch said. “For them, it makes more sense that they’re involved than not involved in that space. And for the NFL, they want to continue creating these tentpole events and experiences.”
The NFL and its partners do seem to be wary of paywalling too many games. Originally, the Seattle Seahawks vs. Houston Texans game was supposed to be an ESPN+ exclusive before the game was moved to be on the more widely available ESPN. And when TheWrap spoke to Paramount head David Ellison about his plans for the NFL, he emphasized it’s important to him to keep these games free for now rather than paywalled behind Paramount+.
“When you look at the places we’ve distributed our games from an exclusive perspective, like Netflix or YouTube or even Amazon, we were very mindful that those platforms had a critical mass in size and scale and adoption of usage already before we put our games on there,” Hans Schroeder, executive vice president of media distribution for the NFL, told a group of reporters that included TheWrap ahead of the season. “We’ll continue to look at those opportunities going forward, but always from a fan-first lens.”
