2017 NASCAR Season - Television Ratings Thread

JohnHill said:
I heard of it. All you had to do was get cable. If you have cable and on top of that the highest package possible in some areas you still don't get these two channels I highlighted to see current races.
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Much as ESPN needed popular programming to get onto cable packages period, FS1 and NBCSN need popular programming to break into the basic tier. It's the same principle.
 
March 2017

Some more up-to-date #'s.....

NBC Sports Network is in more homes than ever before, an unusual feat at a time when most other cable sports networks are dropping millions of subscribers per year.


Thanks to a new deal with DirecTV, which moved the channel to a more widely distributed tier, NBCSN jumped to a distribution figure of around 85 million homes, a figure that puts it on par with Fox Sports 1 and just a couple of million behind ESPN and ESPN2.

http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/03/03/nbc-sports-network-picks-up-subscribers.html
 
It is apparently yet another Fox sexual harassment scandal that led to Horowitz's abrupt firing. Regardless, he was a noxious presence in the sports TV world, and I am glad to see him gone.
 
This won't do any good until next year but it'll be something to keep an eye on in 2018 - how much FOX's new out-of-home reporting agreement with Nielsen contributes to ratings: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-...n-national-out-of-home-reporting-service.html

And for NBC's portion of the season starting right now keep an eye out for their TAD figure that they report in now. Total Audience Delivery/Television And Digital is something I saw them use regularly in their recent NHL releases.
 
FLRacingFan said:
This won't do any good until next year but it'll be something to keep an eye on in 2018 - how much FOX's new out-of-home reporting agreement with Nielsen contributes to ratings: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-...n-national-out-of-home-reporting-service.html

And for NBC's portion of the season starting right now keep an eye out for their TAD figure that they report in now. Total Audience Delivery/Television And Digital is something I saw them use regularly in their recent NHL releases.
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Very interesting.
 
The TAD figure could be extremely important for Nascar as even if it causes one sponsor to reconsider leaving due to a larger and/or younger audience it will be a good thing.
 
dpkimmel2001 said:


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Mt faulty math says that about 550-600K Nascar on FOX fans abandoned ship this year over last year and while no one likes to see any losses it isn't as bad as it could have been. IDK how to quantify visits to websites and mobile apps or how to monetize them but I am sure some folks do.
 
I seem to recall last year's race was Sunday night, and that was done because more viewers than on Saturday night's. Is that relevant to year on year comparisons?
 
LewTheShoe said:
I seem to recall last year's race was Sunday night, and that was done because more viewers than on Saturday night's. Is that relevant to year on year comparisons?
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I think it ran on Sunday night because Monday was the 4th.

Edit..... Never mind. It ran on Saturday the 2nd.
 
It was 2015, NBC's 1st year back, that they ran it on Sunday night (July 4th was Saturday of that year). As for the increase at NASCAR's website and their apps on Cup day tells me there's still some interest in NASCAR to "scoreboard" watch, to check out the leaderboard from time to time while they're busy doing other things to see how their favorite driver is doing and to see who's leading. People must figure it's much more convenient to do that than to devote 3 or 4 hours watching a complete race. And whether that's translating to revenue is another question.
 
FLRacingFan said:
This won't do any good until next year but it'll be something to keep an eye on in 2018 - how much FOX's new out-of-home reporting agreement with Nielsen contributes to ratings: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-...n-national-out-of-home-reporting-service.html

And for NBC's portion of the season starting right now keep an eye out for their TAD figure that they report in now. Total Audience Delivery/Television And Digital is something I saw them use regularly in their recent NHL releases.
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There's a new paradigm coming to the fore and Nielsen is 2 years behind that curve. Not a surprise.
 
FLRacingFan said:
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To be fair to NASCAR, it is ONLY Pocono but to be fair to the NBA, it's the Pistons at the Spurs. You could barely find two franchises with less "star appeal" than those two and spare me the argument about Duncan being a HOFer. He is but he wasn't exciting to watch for casual fans even though I respect his greatness.
 
NJJammer said:
To be fair to NASCAR, it is ONLY Pocono but to be fair to the NBA, it's the Pistons at the Spurs. You could barely find two franchises with less "star appeal" than those two and spare me the argument about Duncan being a HOFer. He is but he wasn't exciting to watch for casual fans even though I respect his greatness.
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There was a big lull in NBA interest in general after the Jordan Bulls era ended, and it was especially bad in the mid-2000's. A couple of those Finals averaged fewer than 10M viewers. Pretty amazing how much it's bounced back, in just about a polar opposite fashion compared to NASCAR since then.

It's also pretty amazing that over 8.5M people used to watch a race at Pocono. :eek:
 
NJJammer said:
To be fair to NASCAR, it is ONLY Pocono but to be fair to the NBA, it's the Pistons at the Spurs. You could barely find two franchises with less "star appeal" than those two and spare me the argument about Duncan being a HOFer. He is but he wasn't exciting to watch for casual fans even though I respect his greatness.
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What about David Robinson? The Admiral? C'mon man that team had two hall of famers
 
FLRacingFan said:
There was a big lull in NBA interest in general after the Jordan Bulls era ended, and it was especially bad in the mid-2000's. A couple of those Finals averaged fewer than 10M viewers. Pretty amazing how much it's bounced back, in just about a polar opposite fashion compared to NASCAR since then.

It's also pretty amazing that over 8.5M people used to watch a race at Pocono. :eek:
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8.5 million viewers from Pocono in 2005 is staggering compared to the 3.5 million in 2017. The Daytona 500 will be fortunate to get that many viewers in another year or so.
 
Yeah. The Pistons/Spurs matchup was generally pretty terrible for ratings. The Spurs have been great for so long, but Duncan isn't the flashy superstar player that everyone wants to tune in to.\
 
AuzGrams said:
Yeah. The Pistons/Spurs matchup was generally pretty terrible for ratings. The Spurs have been great for so long, but Duncan isn't the flashy superstar player that everyone wants to tune in to.\
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Exactly. The lack of star power in NASCAR is crushing it currently, just like golf and tennis are feeling
 
NASCAR’s first-half viewership trends down
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/...7/10/Leagues-and-Governing-Bodies/NASCAR.aspx

NASCAR’s new racing format and title sponsor weren’t enough to prevent a slip in TV ratings for the first half of the season.

Despite being up 5 percent in viewership for the Daytona 500, the sport’s biggest race, the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series was down 12 percent in viewership from the first half of last season, from an average of 5.6 million to 4.9 million. After Daytona, Fox Sports only saw one more race with an audience uptick, and eight of 14 races studied saw double-digit percentage declines compared to 2016.

Moreover, the sport’s two publicly traded track corporations, International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports Inc., have both reported drops in admissions revenue thus far this season — this on the heels of years of similar incremental downticks.

Still, executives say they’ve seen enough positive storylines to keep them confident in the sport’s overall standing.

“It’s a bit of a mixed bag,” Steve Phelps, executive vice president and chief global sales and marketing officer at NASCAR, said of the ratings. “There are certainly people who would say that, ‘Hey, NASCAR is down.’ I would say that we’re actually not down; we’re down in a particular metric, but there are other metrics where we’re up and up significantly.”

Positive indicators included Monster Energy Series events being the Nos. 1 or 2 most-watched sport event of the weekend 13 out of 16 weekends during the Fox season, Fox Sports Go’s average minute audience for Monster Energy Series races being up 64 percent from last year, and NASCAR’s social platforms being up more than 70 percent in engagement.

Fox carried the first half of the season and NBC will broadcast the second half. Among the most prominent silver linings for Fox, its ad sales group said it saw a 5 percent uptick in ad revenue this year, despite the ratings drop.

Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ executive vice president of research for league operations and strategy, pointed out that ratings are ultimately used to drive ad sales, so the uptick in sales is notable. But he stressed that Nielsen ratings will remain the currency of the business for the ad sales industry for the foreseeable future, despite the rise of competing metrics, so the network still takes the reports “very seriously as a measure of how we’re doing business.”

He added that Fox is particularly proud that FS1 beat ESPN2 in total-day viewership for the months of May and June, the first time the channel had done so two months in a row. He cited NASCAR programming as helping drive that, alongside other properties like MLB.

“When you talk about why has FS1 beaten ESPN2 for two months in a row for the first time ever — why FS1 has a chance to pass them for the year to date in the next couple months, I would say the biggest contributor has been NASCAR,” Mulvihill said.

NASCAR introduced stage racing this season as a way to break up multi-hour races into segments amid shifting attention spans from today’s viewers and encourage harder racing earlier in events. Mulvihill said Fox did see average length of tune-in go up this season for Monster Energy Series races, meaning fans tuned into races for longer amounts of time, though it was not by an overly significant amount.

A highlight of stage racing thus far came at Martinsville Speedway, when Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who was a lap down, bumped then-leader Kyle Busch on the final lap of an early stage in order to stay on the lead lap. That’s the sort of situation that may not have taken place if the same scenario was played out but without stage racing. Still, that came at a short track, and there have been fewer highlight-reel moments from 1.5-mile tracks, which comprise the bulk of NASCAR’s schedule. And whether the stages ultimately help reverse viewership declines remains to be seen.

Another reason NASCAR introduced stage racing was to better align commercial breaks on TV with breaks in the action, and NASCAR said Fox showed about 40 percent more green-flag coverage this season, both due to stage racing as well as Fox increasingly using its double box, where one side of the screen shows advertising while another side shows the race.

Phelps said NASCAR data showed fans were initially split on stage racing, but has shifted to more than 80 percent support.

“You get that high a number that quickly, and you know you’ve hit on something that’s going to work,” Phelps said.

While some in the NASCAR community expressed frustration by the drop in race viewership, especially the large double-digit drops, one media analyst stressed that NASCAR remains an effective audience driver.

“NASCAR ratings can’t be viewed in isolation,” Neal Pilson, president of Pilson Communications and former president of CBS Sports, wrote in an email. “We are experiencing a slow decline in television ratings for all sports and all networks (including the entertainment channels). In fact, with cord cutting, the cable universe has reduced by 9 million homes (close to 10 percent) in the past 5 years. Network coverage of NASCAR events continues to be the most effective and efficient platform for sponsors and advertisers to reach the auto racing audience.”
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