NASCAR - Television Ratings Thread

I'll take my chances because it's just like the flu or any other virus thru human history.
I'm not going to debate whether you should or shouldn't take your chances; you're an adult, that's your call. But it's NOT 'just like the flu'. That's not opinion, or judgment call, or political stance; it's science. If you are going to take your chances, know the facts.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the-flu :
  • There’s no vaccine yet for COVID-19 and community-wide immunity hasn’t built up.
  • COVID-19 is also more infectious than the flu and has a higher death rate.
  • COVID-19 also has a higher rate of hospitalizations.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-deaths-vs-flu-deaths.html :
  • The average number of flu deaths during the week of peak flu mortality in recent seasons (from 2013 to 2020) was 752 deaths. In contrast, for COVID-19, there were 15,455 deaths reported in the U.S. during the week ending April 21
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hea...ronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
  • While both the flu and COVID-19 may be transmitted in similar ways, there is also a possible difference: COVID-19 might be spread through the airborne route, meaning that tiny droplets remaining in the air could cause disease in others even after the ill person is no longer near.
  • Flu: A vaccine is available and effective to prevent some of the most dangerous types or to reduce the severity of the flu. COVID-19: No vaccine is available at this time, though development and testing is in progress.
  • Flu: In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu. COVID-19: In the U.S, 111,007 people have died of COVID-19, as of June 9, 2020.
I freely admit to 'cherry-picking' these excerpts. Use the links provided if you want to read the full articles; there's little in them to refute what I chose.
 
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46 million Twitter followers worth of exposure here. Hopefully tonight's race will go as scheduled and break the string of underwhelming viewership for mid-week races.
Speaking strictly as a fantasy commissioner, mid-week races and double-headers suck. Not enough time to turn a league around. If they don't survive into 2021, I'll be all the happier.
 
Not really anything crazy here. Should translate into about 2M viewers when the finals come out later today. The spring Martinsville race earned a 1.5 rating and 2.46M viewers on a Sunday afternoon on FS1 last year. I’m thinking midweek races are not long for this world.

 
Not really anything crazy here. Should translate into about 2M viewers when the finals come out later today. The spring Martinsville race earned a 1.5 rating and 2.46M viewers on a Sunday afternoon on FS1 last year. I’m thinking midweek races are not long for this world.


yeah more Skip and Shannon they are knocking em dead.
 
Imo the thing that hurt that race last night it was too long for a mid week race. To me any midweek race needs to be closer to the 2.25 hour window. The 3 to 3.5 hour long races are good, but not for what is considered a work/school night.

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Imo the thing that hurt that race last night it was too long for a mid week race. To me any midweek race needs to be closer to the 2.25 hour window. The 3 to 3.5 hour long races are good, but not for what is considered a work/school night.

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3-3.5 hours is too long period. That race was 100 laps too long.
 
You are dead to me. :eek:

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The “comparable race” was a postponed Monday afternoon race at Dover that didn’t crack 800K.

I think it’s pretty telling when Bristol can get 2.9M on a Sunday and a week and half later Martinsville gets 1.7M on a Wednesday, no rain impacts between the two.

Not sure why anyone would want fewer people watching races, and then have to resort to mental gymnastics to paint a poor number in a good light. It is what it is.
 
I think network primetime with the expected promotional push could be a game changer for the potential viewership on weeknights. If Fox and / or NBC don't want to do that, the cable nets can clearly do better on the weekend, at least with Cup.

Personally I like the mid-week events, and I hope they will keep it under consideration for all three series.
 
There's a lot of spinning in those tweets about the amount of viewers. Also fails to mention that besides Supercross there was literally no other live sports on. There haven't been many other live sports on during their races since they came back and the numbers still haven't jumped. They simply aren't pulling in new viewers because the races and the drivers, especially to first timers aren't very interesting.

It is what it at this point and it's probably going to remain this way for a very long time.
 
There's a lot of spinning in those tweets about the amount of viewers. Also fails to mention that besides Supercross there was literally no other live sports on. There haven't been many other live sports on during their races since they came back and the numbers still haven't jumped. They simply aren't pulling in new viewers because the races and the drivers, especially to first timers aren't very interesting.

It is what it at this point and it's probably going to remain this way for a very long time.

I suppose if a person assumes that everybody thought that without any other sports on to watch that the dedicated stick n ballers would turn on Nascar because they HAD to and they would be saying to each other, man, I can't believe what I have been missing and become a fan for life.
 
A long read, but worth it for us tech geeks...
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Fox Sports’ NASCAR Coverage Has That Familiar RoarCrowd sounds are slowly easing back to frame starts and finishes

By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Friday, June 19, 2020 - 11:32 am
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NASCAR is one of the first major sports to resurface after the COVID-19 pandemic locked down virtually all sports events globally in March. The races are on again, often with as many as three races in a week to make up for lost time. Although the world has changed, much about the races’ sound remains the same.

A1 Kevin McCloskey: “Once the race is on, [the sound] is like it always was.”

“It’s pretty much business as usual,” says Kevin McCloskey, A1 for the Fox Sports broadcasts, preparing to set up for the GEICO 500 this weekend in Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway following a pair of races in Miami last weekend. “The configuration of some of the people can vary, but the audio is mostly the same as it has been.”

In addition to McCloskey and effects submixer Chip Weaver, the director and one or two pit reporters are onsite, as is the in-car–radio team, working with BSI for wireless to handle the 40 cars on the track. All of that audio goes to McCloskey’s Calrec Apollo console aboard Game Creek’s Cleatus truck. (Game Creek has three trucks onsite; BSI and SMT have one each.) However, the show’s announcers are in NASCAR’s Charlotte, NC, studios, as are the show’s producer and the AD. The graphics and EVS replay operators are in Fox Sports’ Los Angeles studios, although the EVS decks themselves are at the racetrack compound. They’re all connected by an RTS comms system, itself overseen by Andy Roston, working from New York City.

Compounding that deployment of people and assets is the fact that, while the in-car–radio mixers are working from the race compound, editor Jeff Bratta is working from his home, assembling story packages from the radio feeds on a pair of Apple Mac Mini computers. Over an internet connection via Unity Connect, which provides low latency and broadcast-ready quality, the packages will be sent to McCloskey, into the console via MADI, and interspersed during the broadcast.

Crowd Sound Returns
McCloskey says the setup for each show may reflect some variations on those arrangements, but, once the show begins, it’s almost as though the pandemic never happened.

Almost. The thinness of the crowd is noticeable at the beginning and end of the broadcasts. The Talladega race is expected to have the largest onsite audience yet: 5,000 fans. In Miami the week before, only 1,000 mostly military veterans were allowed in.

“More people in the stands is a welcome addition to the sound,” McCloskey says. “That’s what makes up a large part of the 20 minutes or so before the race starts. For the last few shows, we’ve been using music and some other sounds, such as track ambience, as a setting for the announcers and interviews. It’s good to hear the crowds again.”

The microphone complement, he adds, is largely the same as it has been for the past several years, with fewer microphones aimed at the stands but shotgun mics added to increase the range on long robo-cam approach shots, giving the director more loiter time on the shot with audio.

“I sat back and listened to the sound from the last race, and it really does sound the same,” he says, an accomplishment given the extent to which COVID-19 has changed the way broadcasting, like everything else in the world, works. “We have to think a bit more ahead for the setup, but, once the race is on, it’s like it always was.
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Hopefully this is clean enough to stay in the main forum - so far, early returns show those who said they were done with NASCAR aren't really done with NASCAR, or they're an extremely vocal minority. And the extensive rain delays have led to substantial increases in total race day programming consumed - filler viewing is up 841%. :oops:


The day after NASCAR banned the Confederate flag from its racetracks, “Today” show anchor Craig Melvin predicted that the move “will probably help NASCAR mainstream the sport, something that they’ve been trying to do for a number of years.

On the same show, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace said that “a lot of first-time watchers” tuned into the June 10 race from Martinsville on FS1 that occurred the same day as the ban. He said that race included “a lot from the African American community that would never give NASCAR a chance.”

Given the amount of press coverage, many around the sport have been obsessing about how the audience will shift in the aftermath of the flag ban and are poring over the early numbers.

Television ratings from two races are not enough to draw any sweeping conclusions. It will take a while before NASCAR notices any kind of demographic shift among its fans from its decision to ban the flag. But if there was going to be a dramatic change in the ratings or audience makeup, people invested in NASCAR expected to see it in the first broadcast race after the ban.

It’s only one race, but NASCAR executives have to be breathing a sigh of relief. Judging from those early numbers, NASCAR’s move had no effect on the audience. NASCAR did not lose viewers; it did not gain viewers. More interestingly, NASCAR’s viewer demos did not change at all.

Sometimes ratings are interesting because of what they show you. Sometimes they’re interesting because of what they don’t show you. It’s interesting to me that since this decision was made, NASCAR hasn’t really seen any change in the viewership or the composition of the audience.

The first race following the ban was the Martinsville race on FS1 on a Wednesday night, which produced headlines for a viewership increase that more than doubled a comparable race last year (1.7 million viewers versus 805,000). But that 113% increase comes with an asterisk because last year’s comparable race was a rain-rescheduled one from Dover in early May.

In looking at the demos from the last Fox broadcast race before the flag ban (Atlanta on June 7) and the first broadcast race after the ban (Homestead on June 14), the audiences are remarkably similar.

It’s the same makeup of audience that we would traditionally expect. In other words, if you were to examine the viewership for all NASCAR events this year and then try to pinpoint where in this season NASCAR made a historic decision about how it will stage its events, you wouldn’t be able to identify it. Any small changes should be attributed to statistical noise rather than a change in policy.

The audience actually got slightly older after the ban. Median income didn’t change significantly, nor did the TV audience’s racial composition (see chart).

The most densely populated areas (described as ‘A’ counties by Nielsen) made up 23% of viewers in the race before the ban and 24% of viewers in the race after the ban. The least densely populated areas (‘C’ and ‘D’ counties, per Nielsen) made up 41% of the audience before and 42% of the audience after.

The story was the same from last week’s race in Talladega, with no change to median age, income or geographic distribution. The race saw a little bit of an uptick in Black viewers, who made up 6% of the Monday audience. But that viewership gain did not come at the expense of other viewer demos.

NASCAR’s ratings over the past month have produced several takeaways. First, it’s clear that a pent-up demand for sports viewers exists. But that demand only lasts for a couple of weeks before ratings return to normal.

Since coming back, NASCAR ratings have been good, thanks primarily to its first race back on May 17, when 6.3 million viewers tuned in for the Darlington race. That marked a three-year high for the Cup Series outside of the Daytona 500. But since that Sunday race, viewership has fallen steadily, with no Cup Series race drawing more than 4 million viewers.

Second, despite the pandemic and the flag ban, weather — plain old rain — has had the biggest impact on ratings this year. Every NASCAR race so far this season, except one, either had a rain interruption or was run under the threat of a rain interruption. NASCAR and Fox have had few instances where they could start their race day confident that the race was going to begin and end on time.

Consider these stats:

■ Total consumption of Cup Series races is down 3% year-to-year (11.02 billion minutes of viewing versus 11.41 billion minutes).

■ At the same time, total consumption of NASCAR Cup Series rain delays and contingency programming is up 841% (2.66 billion minutes versus 282 million minutes).

■ If you combine the two, total viewing of NASCAR Cup Series content — races, rain delays and contingency programming — is up 17% over last year (13.68 billion minutes versus 11.69 billion minutes).

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Hopefully this is clean enough to stay in the main forum - so far, early returns show those who said they were done with NASCAR aren't really done with NASCAR, or they're an extremely vocal minority. And the extensive rain delays have led to substantial increases in total race day programming consumed - filler viewing is up 841%. :oops:




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I'm pretty conservative, but the Confederate flag is not the hill I'm going to die on. It's no different than waving a Soviet flag in my book. Good riddance.
 
I wonder how many of those saying they were done with NASCAR had watched or attended a race in years? It's easy for me to raise Hell about boycotting something that I already stopped participating in, or that I was never involved with in the first place.
 
Hopefully this is clean enough to stay in the main forum - so far, early returns show those who said they were done with NASCAR aren't really done with NASCAR, or they're an extremely vocal minority. And the extensive rain delays have led to substantial increases in total race day programming consumed - filler viewing is up 841%. :oops:




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Shows just how small a minority the “Bubba ruined NASCAR” and “No flag no NASCAR” crew is. They sure are loud though.
 
I wonder how many of those saying they were done with NASCAR had watched or attended a race in years? It's easy for me to raise Hell about boycotting something that I already stopped participating in, or that I was never involved with in the first place.

I know my aunt is one and she hasn’t watched in years lol.
 
The only race with direct comparison was up 300k even with rain delays... pretty good.
 
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