‘Thursday Night Football’ Sees Ratings Climb 24% Over 2022, Averaging 11.86 Million Viewers Per Game
In its second season broadcasting national games exclusively on Prime Video, “TNF” scored a big gain in terms of viewership.
The 2023 “Thursday Night Football” season on Prime Video is officially over. After a 2022 campaign that drew ratings 41% lower than the year before when “TNF” aired on linear TV channels, Amazon has announced that its sophomore installment of “TNF” increased its viewership substantially over its rookie outing.
- The highest-rated “TNF” game of 2023 was Seawhawks-Cowboys, which drew 15.1 million viewers.
- ‘TNF’ on Prime Video users are nearly seven years younger than the average football watcher.
- Amazon drew an average of 9.61 million viewers for the league’s first ever Black Friday game.
How Did ‘TNF’ Broadcasts Stack Up Against 2022?
According to Amazon, “Thursday Night Football” in 2023 gained 24% in terms of total viewers compared to the 2022 season. It averaged 11.86 million viewers per game over the 15-week “TNF” season, as compared to 9.6 million last year. The highest-rated contest of the year was the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys thriller in Week 13, which brought in 15.1 million viewers on average.
The 2023 season continued the youth movement for Amazon as far as its audience was concerned. In 2022, “TNF” saw an 11% rise year-over-year in the number of 18 to 34-year-olds watching the games. That success continued this year, as the company announced 13 weeks of double-digit increases in the number of viewers in that demographic. All in all, the average “TNF” viewer is 48.5 years old, which is almost seven years younger than the average NFL viewer watching on traditional linear channels.
“We’re still very much at the beginning, but Thursday Night Football’s record growth in our second season is beyond encouraging as we work to super serve fans and advertisers,” Prime Video VP Jay Marine said. “We are building TNF on Prime into an incredibly valuable franchise, and our production and tech teams deserve a great deal of credit for the quality and innovation we have delivered to fans, and we are just getting started.”
How Do ‘TNF’ Ratings on Prime Video Compare to Broadcast TV?
While “TNF” ratings are creeping closer to those achieved by the NFL on broadcast channels like CBS, Fox, and NBC, they still don’t stack up completely. According to Sports Media Watch, there were seven NFL games on linear TV in Week 16 alone that beat Prime Video’s viewership average of 11.86 million viewers per contest. The Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins tilt drew 31 million viewers in that week.
A report from Variety indicates that while Prime Video may not be beating linear TV channels in terms of ratings, it is competing well with other streaming platforms. Variety’s data shows that Prime Video’s 15-game average is much lower than the 16.3 million viewers who watched the Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars game on Dec. 23, but much higher than the 6.1 million viewers who watched Peacock’s exclusive game between the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers on Dec. 23 via streaming.
One interesting nugget of news in Amazon’s data shows that it decided to introduce a “measurement enhancement” from Nielsen this season. That enhancement combines Amazon’s first-party viewing signal aggregated from the millions of connected TV devices streaming “TNF” with Nielsen’s panel-based TV measurement to give a more comprehensive cross-platform ratings view. According to this measurement, Amazon averaged 12.95 million viewers per game across smart TVs, computers, and all other platforms.
Amazon first announced that it was partnering with Nielsen for this new type of measurement in late August, drawing the ire of other football broadcasters who did not think it was fair for Amazon’s first-party data to be taken at face value and incorporated into Nielsen measurements. Nielsen promised to send the new measurement tool to the Media Ratings Council for review, and Amazon’s press release notes that review is still ongoing.
Prime Video has a long way to go before it can successfully challenge linear broadcasts of NFL games. Nonetheless, the streamer has made meaningful improvements in ratings for “TNF” contests and is doing an excellent job of reaching younger viewers, a statistic crucial to all live sports purveyors because of their difficulty to reach and because of their higher levels of disposable income.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.