NBC Sports announced yesterday that the first two games, against Michigan and Ball State, of the 2018 Notre Dame football season have been the most-watched in eight years. Notre Dame Football on NBC is up sixty-five percent (65%) over last season. Clearly, you like to watch.
NBC tracks its viewing metrics a bit differently than a simple trawl through Nielsen’s data. NBC uses an acronym that is straight out of the Sean Spicer School of Photoshop: Total Audience Delivery (TAD). TAD is an attempt to measure viewership across all platforms, to include on-demand and mobile devices. Interestingly, NBC has discovered that 87% of Notre Dame viewers prefer to watch on traditional, cathode-ray tube televisions and in black-and-white. Thirty percent (30%) of those viewers, they further learned, turn the volume down and listen to the broadcast on the clearest AM station.
This season’s average TAD across the two games is 4.837 million. This compares very well with last season’s average TAD of 2.93 million and is the Peacock Network’s “best viewership since 2010.” In 2010, NBC enjoyed 5.36 million per game, against Purdue and Michigan.
Looking at the two games, NBC stated that over 7 million people watched the Michigan, making it “the most-watched college football game of Labor Day weekend.” Fifty-five percent (55%) more people watched the Ball State game than watched last season’s Temple game. One hundred percent would rather watch grass grow than watch either game again.
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