YouTube’s Revised NFL Game Rating Still Has Fox, ESPN Execs Upset 

The already-fractious debate over viewership of YouTube’s NFL game on Sept. 5 has taken another major turn as the streamer has revised its audience figures, reigniting tensions around the measurement.

Four days after initially announcing a global audience of 17.3 million for the Chiefs–Chargers game from Brazil, YouTube disclosed late Friday an adjusted figure of 19.7 million. 

The new breakdown includes U.S. viewership of 18.5 million and 1.2 million elsewhere around the world. The company said the update became necessary after discovering “an internal technical issue” in its metrics.

“A subset of legitimate views were not categorized as actual views. As a result, the viewership numbers for this game were undercounted,” YouTube said in a blog post. “We’ve revalidated the numbers with Nielsen, after providing them with the updated first-party data. This is an unfortunate situation, and we’ll do better next time.”

The change only appeared to reignite frustration from other NFL rights holders, particularly Fox and ESPN. 

Those two networks have repeatedly criticized YouTube’s use of a custom, non-accredited measurement for the game—one not conforming to Nielsen’s newly introduced Big Data + Panel process.

In his latest broadside against YouTube, Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill likened the audience revision to Donald Trump’s attempts to change Georgia voting results in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes,” Mulvihill tweeted, parroting Trump’s comments at the time to Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensberger. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

ESPN SVP of research Flora Kelly, another sharp critic of the YouTube metrics, retweeted Mulvihill’s comment.

YouTube and Nielsen have not fully detailed why they were not able to align with the audience measurement used by other NFL rights holders.

The new U.S. audience for the NFL Brazil game beats last year’s comparable presentation on NBCUniversal’s Peacock by 30%. Considering the subscription-based model for Peacock and the free availability of YouTube, though, the higher figure remains a disappointment and is still well below the league’s streaming record of more than 24 million seen on Netflix last Christmas. 

The YouTube situation is the lone hiccup in what was a banner Week 1 of viewership for the NFL, with each of the other networks posting historic audiences to start the season.