Super Bowl Delivers Largest Audience Ever, With 123.7 Million Total Viewers (Updated)
CBS’ Sunday broadcast of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl 58 win over the San Francisco 49ers drew about 5 million viewers for every cutaway to Taylor Swift.
In a ratings update, Nielsen reported on Tuesday morning that the Chiefs’ 25-22 championship win — in only the second Super Bowl ever to go into overtime — averaged 123.7 million viewers, up 78% from last year’s Big Game.
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Super Bowl LVIII on CBS in and of itself drew 120.3 million linear viewers, the largest audience in history for a single network hosting the game and the best household rating (43.5) since Super Bowl LI in 2017.
An additional 2.3 million viewers watched the Spanish-language broadcast on Univision, and 1.2 million tuned in to watch the kid-friendly broadcast on Nickelodeon and Nick-at-Nite.
Sunday’s game also stands as the most-streamed Super Bowl in history, thanks to a record-setting audience on Paramount+ (though no supporting data points were furnished).
All told, more than 200 million viewers (202.4) watched all or part of Super Bowl LVIII across linear and streaming, up 10% from last year and marking the highest unduplicated total audience in Super Bowl history.
Best & Worst Super Bowl Commercials
Among Super Bowl Sunday’s pre- and mid-game entertainment, Andra Day’s performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” earned an average reader grade of “C,” Post Malone’s take on “America the Beautiful” drew a “B-,” Reba McEntire’s singing of the national anthem scored an “A-,” and Usher’s halftime show netted a “C.”
Following the Big Game this year was the series premiere of the Justin Hartley-led Tracker, which nearly tied Alias (circa 2003) and Elementary (2013) for the latest start time ever for a lead-out, getting underway as it did just before 11:15 pm ET. TVLine readers gave Tracker‘s premiere an average grade of “B+,” with a whopping 94% saying they’ll come back for Episode 2.
Viewership numbers for Tracker can be found here.
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