In all my years as a sports viewership nerd, both writing about the subject as well as reading about it, I’ve never lived in a time where there is more interest in that metric. Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic and a polarized electorate has prompted questions about what the decline in some of the jewel events of the sports calendar has meant. Sports Media Watch founder and editor Jon Lewis has done yeoman’s work updating the sports viewership trend of some of the most famous properties, and the trend has pointed in one direction — down. If you want an example from this week, Game 1 of the World Series on Tuesday drew 9.195 million viewers on Fox, the smallest World Series audience on record and the first World Series game to draw fewer than 10 million viewers since Game 3 of the 2008 Phillies-Rays World Series (9.836 million viewers on a Saturday night).
You’ve read a lot on this site and elsewhere about sports viewership. So this week I decided to…
