Bowl-A-Palooza: Football’s Domination of TV Viewership Last Week

Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for December 25-31, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

Ahh…one of the weirdest weeks of the year, that dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s where every day feels like a Sunday — which actually fits well when it came to TV viewership: Football accounted for nearly 20% of all watch-time, with almost 12% coming from NFL games and over 7% from various college bowl games combined. 

Some additional insights about the top programming on TV:

• The Cotton Bowl Classic, which saw the Missouri Tigers defeat the Ohio State Buckeyes, was the No. 3 program for the week, capturing a 0.90% viewership share. Just behind that in third place was the Orange Bowl, where the Georgia Bulldogs absolutely obliterated the Florida State Seminoles 63-3. That blowout captured 0.88% of watch-time. 

• Other college football bowl games that make the top 25 programs include the Peach Bowl (No. 6), Pop-Tarts Bowl (No. 17), Liberty Bowl (No. 18), Duke’s Mayo Bowl (No. 20), Alamo Bowl (No. 23) and Gator Bowl (No. 24).

• The CBS New Year’s Eve Special Nashville’s Big Bash takes fifth place on the ranking with a 0.87% viewership share — notably higher than ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which captured 0.35% of watch-time for the week.

• Thanks to rerun marathons on Paramount Network, particularly on New Year’s Eve, Yellowstone rockets into the ranking at No. 8 with 0.72% of minutes watched. 

Want more insights? This post on The Measure takes a look at the networks that captured the most holiday watch-time.