Personal home viewing wasn’t the only way to watch Super Bowl LII last Sunday, and less than a week after NBC’s broadcast of the game, out-of-home viewer figures from Nielsen have bumped up the network’s total viewer estimates by 12 million.
NBC said the ‘out-of-home’ metric was based solely on viewership of the NBC broadcast and accounts for a 12 percent jump to an average of 115.6 million viewers, up from 103.4 million viewers reported on Monday.
To calculate the out-of-home metric, Nielsen uses portable people meters to account for viewing in public places like bars, gyms, and hotels.
“We know that the Super Bowl is watched in large groups by many at parties, on college campuses, and elsewhere, so we are pleased to be able to report a lift that is in the double digits percentage wise to our NBC broadcast,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Broadcasting & Sports, said in a statement. “We will continue to utilize ‘out of home’ reporting throughout the Winter Games, as the Olympics is a communal event that brings people together.”
NBC said out-of-home viewership will be measured for every primetime event during its coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
Not counting the out-of-home viewers, Nielsen estimated 103.4 million people watched the Philadelphia Eagles take down the New England Patriots last weekend. That figure is the smallest audience for the Super Bowl since 2009, and down about 7 percent from the 111.3 million that watched Fox’s broadcast last year.
With the new out-of-home figure added, Super Bowl LII now recorded a Total Audience Delivery of 118.2 million viewers across all platforms including NBC, NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, NBC.com ‘TV Everywhere,’ Universo, En Vivo app, MFL.com, MFL Mobile from Verizon, the Yahoo Sports app, and go90 – up from the previous estimate of 106 million viewers across platforms.