Thank you, Taylor Swift.
NBC Sports’ telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 23-20 win over the New York Jets drew a monster 27 million viewers Sunday night.
Through Week 4, NBC has now televised the two most-watched NFL games this season.
With pop superstar Swift in attendance at an NFL game for the second straight week to cheer on Travis Kelce, the “Sunday Night Football” telecast drew 2 million more female viewers than usual.
It peaked at 29.4 million viewers in the second quarter as the Jets pulled within eight points of the defending Super Bowl champions.
NBC producers leaned into “The Swift Bowl,” with a special intro devoted to “Swifties” by Carson Daly and no less than 17 cutaway shots of the singer and her entourage in a luxury box at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The network’s “Taylor Made for Sunday Night” promo was watched 8 million times.
The game’s average audience of 27 million viewers was up 22% from last year’s comparable Week 4 game between Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs and Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers (22.2 million viewers). But the total fell just short of NBC’s average for the Chiefs season-opening loss to the Detroit Lions (27.5 million).
Viewership among teen girls aged 12-17 years old rose 53% compared to the season-to-date average of SNF, while female viewers aged 18-24 years old — and those 35 and over — spiked 24% and 34%, respectively.
The game also marked NBC’s largest ever streaming audience for a regular-season Sunday night game. Led by Peacock, the average minute audience (AMA) totalled 1.85 million viewers – up 42% from last year’s comparable Week 4 game.
Over the last two weeks, NFL games with Swift in attendance rang up 24.3 million viewers for Fox and 27 million for NBC.
Anybody really want to argue she’s not bringing new viewers to the NFL?
