Expanded Television Ratings for SEC and Big Ten Football Games as Nielsen Increases Geographic Focus to Include College Towns
College football has seen a significant shift in audience measurement, as millions of fans watching outside their homes were previously going uncounted. This oversight has now been addressed, thanks to the implementation of Out-of-Home (OOH) measurement by Nielsen.
Nielsen's OOH coverage expanded from 66% of all markets to 100% in February 2023, a move that is expected to provide a significant boost to Saturday ratings. The company will report results from various college football matchups, including the Badgers' local base of 443,200 TV homes, the Irish (Notre Dame) and Nittany Lions' faithful (Penn State) with 331,800 and 285,520 TV homes respectively, and the Rebels (Ole Miss) with their home market serving 666,300 TV homes.
The addition of previously overlooked college towns is expected to have a positive impact on the ratings. In fact, among the top 25 programs, Ole Miss, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Penn State, Florida State, LSU, Oregon, Auburn, and Tennessee will see their TV stats rise this fall.
The OOH measurement system now includes audiences in bars, restaurants, gyms, and private residences. When impressions served up via the old WatchESPN app were factored in, the total audience for ESPNβs college football slate grew 10%.
This change in audience measurement comes at a time when traditional TV usage is declining. Over the course of the 2024-25 broadcast season, overall TV usage fell 10% versus the year-ago period, while the legacy cable bundle closed out the nine-month stretch with fewer than 45 million paying customers. Pay-TV penetration is down to just 52% of all U.S. TV homes, down from a peak of 91%.
The adoption of OOH measurement in college football was initiated by ESPN in 2013 when they inked the industry's first OOH guarantees with the Publicis Groupe agency, Spark. This move was a response to the realization, validated by the first batch of OOH data in 2016, that scores of fans were being excluded from official audience totals.
Interestingly, this shift in audience measurement was not a new concept in the 1980s. ABC executives failed to convince any advertising partners to pay for estimated OOH audiences during Monday Night Football. However, the landscape has changed significantly, and the benefits of OOH measurement are now being realized in the college football arena.
The location that Nielsen fully introduced with OOH measurement in 2024-25, counts among the top 25 programs, and is expected to see a significant viewer increase. However, this specific location is not explicitly identified in the provided search results.
The overall lift on a rate-of-change basis looks to be about +5% versus the year-ago period, with pricing for some college football windows rising higher than others. In the 2023 Thanksgiving Day NFL broadcast, 41% of the audience watched from beyond their own households, a trend that is likely to continue in the era of expanded OOH measurement.
This expanded OOH measurement is set to revolutionize the way audience numbers are reported for college football, allowing networks to more deftly maneuver through a market that is growing increasingly more unstable.
