NFL and Yahoo! boasted that 460 minutes of video had been consumed, along with 33.6 million streams, or 15.2 million unique views. The NFL said on Monday it was “thrilled with the results.”
But when digital numbers are put side by side with TV ratings, the picture looked a whole lot weaker.
Yahoo! delivered an average 1.6 million US viewers per minute, sources told The Post. And since Yahoo! put the game on its homepage with an autoplay function, anyone who took longer than three seconds to turn it off was counted as a view.
Financially, the NFL wins because Yahoo! paid $20 million to stream the Sunday morning game between two smaller market teams, the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But sources have questioned whether Yahoo! will make a profit off the game.
Indeed, a Barclays equity research report out late Monday suggests that Yahoo! took a $14 million loss on the game, not including the costs estimated at $1 million for webcasting the event.
“With an average streaming audience of 1.634 million in the US and two small TV markets, it ranks as one of the least-viewed NFL games ever,” one sports industry source said.
Nice job.
[Claire Atkinson]
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