YouTube’s Friday Night NFL Audience Highlights Specific Limitations
The NFL’s free YouTube stream from Brazil last Friday night was a success on various levels.
Data from Nielsen and YouTube indicated an average-minute audience of 16.2 million in the U.S., with 17.3 million total. The Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers played a relatively exciting and close game. And the game probably does what the NFL intended: Growing the league’s audience beyond its typical fan base, both domestically and abroad.
With all of that said, though, it’s also worth wondering if tune-in could’ve and should’ve been much larger for the week one contest.
Not that it should’ve hit the 24 million-viewer mark that the league’s Netflix games achieved on Christmas last year. But this WAS a free game, on YouTube (supposedly TV’s most-watched streaming service), on a Friday night. A team from Los Angeles faced the team that Taylor Swift’s fiancee plays for. Popular creators including MrBeast were not only invited to promote the game, but were involved with the broadcast itself. And the game was available not just in the U.S., but in well over 200 countries worldwide.
At an international level alone, there’s a case to be made that viewership should’ve been well above the 1.1 million non-U.S. viewers that watched. Domestically, a game tailormade for young fans did one of two things: It either failed to get them watching, OR it failed to get older fans tuning in on YouTube.
The Friday night game, in year two now, is a tough sell in some respects. And last year’s Peacock game drew fewer viewers, at 14.2 million — at least in part influenced by the fact that the game was for U.S. audiences and wasn’t free.
But again: If you got most of those viewers to carry over from last year, the YouTube game didn’t necessarily add much, even after diminishing hurdles for audiences to watch.
The other limitation, of course, is the measurement.
At Puck, Julia Alexander correctly argues that the YouTube game should be counted differently than traditional TV. But if it is being counted differently, should that responsibility be Nielsen’s?
ESPN’s SVP of Research, Flora Kelly says no.
With the start of football comes Nielsen changes (Big Data, new times etc)
— Flora Kelly (@ESPNFlora) September 5, 2025
And the latest wrinkle a custom methodology that Nielsen created for YouTube's NFL game. Not the same approach as the rest of us, nor MRC accredited. Conclusion ... their rating is not a fair comp
ESPN weighing in would be news by itself. But this also comes on the heels of the NFL’s own criticisms of Nielsen in advance of the season.
If Nielsen is accused of undercounting on national linear TV (its bread and butter) as it is, then it rightfully raises questions around its ability to accurately measure YouTube — especially given changes to its approach and a custom methodology here, as Kelly points out.
Nielsen claiming that this will be its most accurate season yet (as it does in the WSJ piece linked above) is an internal vote of confidence, sure. But one that calls previous results into question to an even greater extent.
When it comes to the YouTube game, specifically, it’s also a moving target in terms of what’s truly important for the NFL and the service.
One could make the case that the main reason you’re putting the game on YouTube is to get away from traditional viewing, traditional audience and measurement, and the traditional definitions of success. So views and viewers are part of that. But so are engagements, shares, posts around the game, etc.
Ultimately, there’s more work to do. And that’s the limitation here. With no true way to declare the YouTube game a “success” here, the league and platform have both ensured a win and made sure that victory’s hard to really pin down. That can change over time, too. And the process of doing so only gets better by effectively running tests like this.
