Jason and Travis Kelce are skeptical of how anyone can claim that teen girls were flocking to “Sunday Night Football” in droves.
After talking about how the NFL’s broadcast partners are “overdoing” the shots of Taylor Swift — cheering on her rumored boyfriend, Travis, and his Chiefs — on their “New Heights” podcast, they started to delve into the reports of how many women were watching on Sunday night against the Jets.
“More than two million female viewers, that’s gotta be an NFL record right there,” Jason said.
Travis was baffled by the number, asking, “How do you even calculate that? There’s female TVs?”
He laughed, “You just base it off all other things that TV watches, and it’s like oh yeah this is definitely a female right here.”
Summing it all up, Jason said, “I guess what we do know is they’re not gonna slow down with it because this was the most highly viewed Sunday night game in a while.”
Later, Jason continued to read the press clippings, and noted that “maybe the craziest stat of this whole thing … ratings were partly powered by a spike in female viewership in the teenage girl demographic — a 53 percent surge.”
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Travis continued to be amazed, asking, “How do they get this stat?”
Jason wondered about how many stats people just “make up” and Travis called the metric “just f–king bogus — show me how you got this stat.”
Jason joked that maybe the stat came from Snapchat and how many “teenage girls were just snapping the game” and continued, “Teenagers don’t even own TVs, do they? How would you know?”
After Jason continued to do a bit about exponential increases in the viewership of dogs and babies, Travis concluded, “You can’t make this s–t up, man, or you can!”
To answer some of their questions, the viewership totals are tabulated by Nielsen, which provides listening devices to samples of households across the country in a Herculean attempt to best approximate how many people in demographics including age, gender, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are watching which program.
It is, to be sure, an inexact science as Nielsen can’t measure everyone, and therefore must extrapolate the data they do collect to the broader population.
Nevertheless, it is at least a neutral, third-party scoreboard that theoretically grades every TV network on the same merits.
On the other hand, no such third-party measurement tool has yet emerged to approximate how many people are consuming popular podcasts like “New Heights”, which has consistently been the top-ranked sports podcast in Apple’s metrics in recent months.
Instead, the public can piece together rankings from platforms like Apple and Spotify, and count YouTube viewership totals — which measure how many people watch, but not for how long or how many average concurrent viewers there are, like Nielsen does with TV.
Podtrac might be the closest, but its scoreboard is incomplete as many podcasts have not given the company the keys to measure their listenership.
Regardless, one can also be skeptical of how much Taylor Swift should be singularly credited for the apparent teenage girl demographic jump.
In addition to shots of the famous pop star every few minutes, this episode of “Sunday Night Football” featured the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs, the Jets coming from the country’s biggest market in New York and a surprisingly close game that was not settled until there were two minutes left — all traditional factors in viewership spikes.
“The Taylor-Travis story is super fun and who doesn’t like fun?” tweeted Fox research executive Michael Mulvihill earlier this week.
“To me it’s a reach to try to make it a business story. And maybe unintentionally patronizing? The ratings demonstrate weekly that the biggest draws on TV among young women are simply good football games.”
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