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Originally Posted by Stillriledup
There's a lot more people in America than there was in 1970, aren't there more people watching just due to there being more people period?
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Correct. I mentioned this several times. The issue we are discussing isn't number of people, but percentage of the population, because the NFL doesn't get any credit for people having more babies or emigrating to the US.
And, as I said, this is all just unreal. It is literally a huge point of discussion in both the media and professional sports industries that almost all professional sports-- including professional football-- have seen their market shares decrease. The only real exception to this is the Super Bowl, which still gets ratings comparable to what it always got.
There are gigantic problems with the argument that everyone is using new media. I only scratched the surface in my last post. In addition to the fact that every sport uses new media, and the fact that the NFL Network's ratings are basically in the sewer except when they show live football games (and their ratings for live football games were so low they were forced to agree to a simulcast with CBS, which the owners did not want to do), the Super Bowl's huge ratings contradict that too, because they show that people actually WILL watch a broadcast if they are interested in the game, even though Super Bowl highlights are all over the apps and the NFL Network and everything else everyone mentions.
I found a nice indicator about new media. This was the biggest play of the regular season last year, exactly the sort of video that you would expect to get a huge number of views in new media. And it did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxbz3DDQzHU
It got 1.7 million views. In contrast, Sunday Night Football-- with its DIMINISHED ratings as opposed to 30 or 40 years ago, averages 24 million viewers a week this year.
So basically the most played new media highlight of last year draws an audience of 1/14th what a broadcast football telecast draws. (And remember, many of those 1.7 million probably watched the game live anyway.)
New media is wonderful, but it's a drop in the bucket. Broadcast television dwarfs everything. So if broadcast television ratings are down (and they are WAY down), that means a much smaller percentage of the population is watching, no matter how much new media is out there.
