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The Super Bowl LVIII scored a ratings touchdown.
Sunday’s matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers drew 123.7 million viewers as it aired across CBS, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Univision, CBS Sports, Univision and NFL digital properties, including NFL+., according to Nielsen fast national and adobe analytics.
That’s up 7.47% from the 115.1 million viewers brought in by last year’s Feb. 12 Super Bowl broadcast of the Kansas City Chiefs’ triumph over the Philadelphia Eagles, which game initially recorded 113 million viewers before updated Nielsen figures tallied an additional 2.1 million viewers to its audience in May.
The matchup, which aired from 6:40 p.m. ET to 10:45 p.m. ET on CBS, averaged a household rating of 43.5, and combined household share of 83, per Nielsen.
CBS in particular scored the largest broadcast TV audience in history with 120 million viewers on the network, wrapping up the football season as the most-watched regular season since the NFL returned to CBS in 1998, and CBS’ best postseason viewership since 1998. The Spanish-language broadcast Univision drew 2.3 million viewers while the family-friendly broadcast on Nickelodeon and Nick-at-Nite scored a viewership of 1.2 million.
Records were set across the board with the game standing as the most-streamed Super Bowl ever, setting a new viewership record for Paramount+, according to Paramount.
Streaming minutes for the Super Bowl LVIII tallied to 2.64 billion total, marking the first digital Super Bowl stream to generate over 2 billion minutes of consumption, and beating the previous record from the Super Bowl LVII, which logged 1.48 billion streaming minutes.
This year’s Super Bowl was inevitably boosted by Taylor Swift’s A-list presence in the Las Vegas stands, alongside Blake Lively and “Karma” collaborator Ice Spice.
Since the “Midnights” singer and Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce confirmed their romance in early fall, Chiefs’ games have seen an uptick in total viewership when compared to last year, especially among younger women, and have broken several ratings records.
Their romance produced the unlikely storybook ending for the 2023-24 professional football season. First the Chiefs advanced to the Super Bowl after defeating the favored Baltimore Ravens. Then at the Super Bowl, after trailing San Francisco the Chiefs came from behind in the second half to win in overtime, 25-22.
The playoffs against the Buffalo Bills scored 50.39 million viewers — the biggest audience for an NFL divisional playoff game ever — and the conference championship against the Baltimore Ravens drew an audience of 55.47 million viewers on CBS — ranking as the most-watched AFC Championship Game ever.