Yahoo Autos TV ratings: Nashville to the end of the line
NASCAR’s annual switch from FOX Sports to NBC Sports got off to a promising start in TV audience. Last Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series round from Nashville averaged a 1.83 Nielsen rating and 3.211 million household viewers, per numbers from ShowBuzzDaily.com. NBC Sports reports that the Total Audience Delivery for the race, including streaming via Peacock and the NBC Sports app, was 3.230 million, making it NBC Sports’ most-watched season opener in three years — up 16% on 2022 — as well as the most-watched sporting event of the weekend. Last year’s race averaged 1.81/2.921m on NBC.
The NASCAR Xfinity Series race from Nashville on Saturday averaged 0.48/823,000 viewers on USA Network, compared to 0.50/796,000 last year on the same cable network.
Back on FOX for its finals from Norwalk on Sunday afternoon, the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series averaged 0.49/818,000. That was a healthy increase on last year — also on FOX — which averaged 0.45/702,000 viewers.
NASCAR Camping World Truck Series action from Nashville Friday night on FS1 averaged 0.29/509,000 viewers, down slightly from last year’s 0.30/534K.
The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship averaged 0.12/174,000 for the second half of the Watkins Glen Six Hours on the USA network.
Editor’s note: ShowBuzzDaily.com announced this week that it is ending its public reporting of ratings figures for television programming, partly in response to the evolution of TV viewing away from linear TV networks to streaming platforms, which has made the reporting of traditional ratings data both more problematic and less informative.
“The balance of home viewing, for better or worse, has swung toward streaming, and the proprietors of those companies have chosen to be opaque with their information, providing data that’s incomplete and unverified when it’s available at all,” ShowBuzzDaily.com’s Mitch Salem noted in announcing the site would be ending its operations. “That very lack of transparency is one of the key issues in the ongoing Writers Guild strike. Meanwhile, scrutiny of linear numbers is becoming a preoccupation akin to documenting angels on the head of a pin.”
The same issue has become an increasing point of concern for RACER, as we’ve worked to keep our readers informed of TV audience numbers for motorsports events while also recognizing the interests of the various racing series and the teams that compete in them in ensuring that a complete and fair picture is presented. RACER has therefore made the difficult decision to suspend its regular weekly reports of racing’s TV ratings, although we will continue to monitor the industry and relate significant viewing figures as they are made available.
