Golf’s great divide continues to make its impact felt, with the PGA Tour’s linear TV numbers taking a notable hit year-to-date. Through the Valero Texas Open, the final PGA Tour event before the Masters, all three of the tour’s main TV partners were seeing viewership declines from 2023.
Through 10 events, NBC is averaging 1.97 million viewers for its Saturday and Sunday rounds, down 16% from 2023. Golf Channel was at 385,000 viewers, also down 18% from 471,000 last year.
CBS had only aired five live tour rounds prior to the Masters (over three events), with the final 18 at Pebble Beach wiped out due to bad weather. But CBS still saw year-over-year declines for those events.
The final round of the Farmers Insurance Open, won by Frenchman Matthieu Pavon, drew just 1.59 million viewers, down 40% year-over-year. The final round of the Genesis Invitational drew a stronger 3.25 million, but that was still down 5% from Jon Rahm's win in 2023.
The drops have not been limited to the PGA Tour, as the Masters saw a 20% decline for its final round. Last year’s Sunday round, boosted by being on Easter Sunday, was the best since 2018.
But this year's final round, in which Scottie Scheffler won by four shots, didn’t crack 10 million viewers and was the tournament’s third-lowest final-round figure since 1993. The only two Masters lower than that were in 2020, when the tournament was played in November because of the pandemic, and in 2021, when there was limited patron attendance and eventual winner Hideki Matsuyama had a five-shot lead late in the round.
In its third year, LIV Golf’s linear viewership on The CW through four events has ranged from 195,000 to a high of 432,000 for its season-opening tournament.
Growth on digital
Despite the drops on linear, the PGA Tour has seen positive growth on its digital platforms. Weekly YouTube video views are up 25%, while average weekly digital visits to the tour’s website are up 18%. On social (Facebook, Instagram, X), traffic to the tour’s channels has increased by 16%. With several more states now allowing sports betting, the tour’s overall betting handle has jumped 16%.
Engagement per viewer on ESPN+ for digital coverage -- which is essentially defined as minutes per user -- was up 3% through the Valero Texas Open.
While CBS’s linear numbers were down, the network did say its streaming coverage on Paramount+ saw gains in households, minutes and average minute audience.
Strong headwinds
A lack of star players at the top of leaderboards is one key reason for the drop in TV viewership this season (the median Official World Golf Ranking place for a winner this season on the tour has been 71; at the same time last year it was 16). The move by several notable names to LIV Golf also likely is contributing to the audience drop.
Mother Nature hasn't been kind to the tour, either. Weeklong weather delays (along with a playoff) forced the WM Phoenix Open to finish well after the Super Bowl had already started. The Cognizant Classic finished on a Monday morning, and the final round at Pebble Beach was washed out, forcing a Saturday finish.
While numbers for this past weekend’s RBC Heritage are not yet available, it will be another example of bad luck with weather. CBS was set for Scottie Scheffler winning another event, and right on the heels of his Masters win. But inclement weather forced delays, and the end of the event was pushed to Monday.
Last year’s first quarter also saw strong viewership for the tour, prior to the June 6 framework agreement between the tour and PIF. “A year ago, you had the crusade, the tour was taking on LIV,” veteran media exec John Kosner said recently. “They had brand-new tournament structures. They had a lot of promotion, they had some exciting conclusions. There was a lot of energy into this a year ago that it's not quite the same thing this year. And these sports are cyclical. You have stars rise and fall.”
Shifting landscape
Nielsen is still the predominant measurement service when it comes to viewership and consumption, but with the landscape shifting to more streaming every day, the tour is looking at other ways, at least internally, to measure data. One of those avenues is through iSpot TV, which puts a greater emphasis on accounting for streaming data. While Nielsen rated, LIV Golf also has been using iSpot to measure data.
But Nielsen is not standing pat, and later this year it's expected to tweak how it measures viewers. Nielsen has about 40,000 households in its panel, which translates to about 100,000 people -- and those measurements only come through panels. But Nielsen will start using ACR data and set-top box data from cable providers. With the new data, Nielsen should be able to pull numbers from around 25 million households.
