Sports Maintains Control of TV Watch-Time

Data & Measurement

Jan 12

With a mostly normal TV schedule in 2021, audiences moved back into old viewership habits. Most of all, that includes watching a considerable amount of sports-related programming, which continues to tower over other linear TV options — as data from VIZIO’s Inscape recently revealed.

Of particular note, NFL games made up 2.7% of minutes watched for the year, while college football accounted for another 1.3%, to take the top two spots by watch-time. NBA games were No. 4 with 0.77% of minutes watched, while SportsCenter was sixth at 0.71% and the Tokyo Olympics were seventh with 0.67% (this despite the latter being on for just a few weeks over the summer).

In all, sports make up eight of the top 30 programs by watch-time and six of the top 11. So it’s no wonder advertisers flock to sports as a result. End-of-year data from iSpot showed that among the eight programs delivering the most TV ad impressions in 2021, six of them were sports programs.

How do sporting events and sports talk programming stack up against one another, though?

Inscape’s data indicates that NFL games accounted for 19.9% of sports-related watch-time on the year, while college football had 9.5%. NBA games made up 5.6% of sports minutes watched, while SportsCenter had 5.2% and the Olympics had 4.9%.

Even though men’s college basketball on its own “only” made up 2.3% of sports watch-time, that jumped to 3.9% when you combine it with the otherwise separate category of the NCAA Tournament, which accounted for another 1.6% over the course of its three-week postseason. Combined, that’s a larger share than MLB regular season and early-round playoff games. On that note, the World Series accounts for 0.7% of sports minutes watched, vaulting MLB to about 4.6% all-in (still sixth among all sports-related programming).

As you might’ve guessed, most programming related to football had audiences tuned in. Not only did NFL and college football place first and second by sports watch-time, related programming also placed remarkably high, such as SportsCenter (No. 4), First Take (No. 10), Get Up (No. 12) and SportsCenter With Scott Van Pelt (No. 13). All regularly discuss football, as do dedicated football programs like NFL Live (No. 20), College Gameday (No. 21), Good Morning Football (No. 23) and Football Night in America (No. 25). And Super Bowl LV, despite proving a pretty one-sided affair with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Kansas City Chiefs, still managed to take home 0.67% of sports watch-time on the year, which ranks 17th among those programs.

Inscape has plenty more insights related to the last year of TV viewership on the VIZIO Ads blog, so check that out for more audience behavior insights related to sports and other programming.