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Super Bowl 2023
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Whether you watched the Super Bowl for the Rihanna halftime show featuring her killer ASL interpreter, the Ben Affleck Dunkin’ commercial, or, you know, the football, you and tens of millions of other people would be in good company.
Super Bowl LVII, which saw the AFC champs the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the NFC champions the Philadelphia Eagles 38 to 35, brought in over 113 million viewers over all platforms on average over the course of the broadcast, the second highest ratings not just in Super Bowl history, but third highest in TV history. That’s right: Super Bowl LVII was the third most watched TV program of all time*.
The most watched moment of the Super Bowl? Rihanna’s halftime show, which drew 118.7 million viewers, and is only second to Katy Perry’s halftime show in 2015 in terms of viewing audience. That said, you can probably knock it up to 118,700,001 for the tiny baby growing in Rihanna’s stomach. Babies grow in the stomach, right? Cool.
Mike Mulvihill, the Head of Strategy & Analytics at Fox Sports, had previously predicted that this year’s event, held in Glendale, Arizona, would likely attract over 115 million viewers, citing high viewership for the league’s NFC and AFC conference championship games, and the fact that the the home-viewing audiences in the teams’ home cities are especially robust and loyal to their sports franchises. Though Super Bowl LVII didn’t reach those heights (missing by two million viewers who presumably had better things to do), it was up 1% versus the previous year’s game, a not insubstantial number when we’re talking about millions of people.
By comparison, the most-watched Super Bowl ever was in 2014 when the New England Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks 28 to 24; on that night, over 114.4 million viewers tuned in for that game, which featured a halftime show performance by Bruno Mars.
Final ratings for the Super Bowl will be distributed on Tuesday, which means it may rise even higher. Oh boy!
*The small asterisk to this record is the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, which is essentially run on every TV channel in existence at the time and watched by an estimated viewership of between 125 and 150 million people.
