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Sprint Cup first-half viewership shows decline

Fox Sports’ second Sprint Cup race, in Atlanta, showed a 28 percent year-over-year drop, but the network’s results stabilized after that.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
Television viewership for the first half of the NASCAR Sprint Cup season is down again, but Fox Sports and NASCAR executives say they are encouraged by some of the viewership statistics that aren’t making headlines.

On the surface, the total viewing story was not good this year for Fox, which splits Cup and Xfinity series media rights with NBC Sports Group. Fox averaged 5.578 million viewers for 15 Cup races it aired in 2016, excluding the rain-affected event at Pocono, which was moved to Monday. That’s down from 5.925 million viewers for 15 races in 2015, a number that excluded that year’s rain-delayed event at Bristol, for a drop of 6 percent. Fox particularly was hurt this season by races on its broadcast network, for which viewership dropped 13 percent from last year and decreased for eight of 10 Cup races. Fox’s NASCAR viewership started the season in a hole, as numbers for the season-opening Daytona 500 dropped 15 percent and the following weekend’s Atlanta race dropped a whopping 28 percent.

NASCAR Sprint Cup year over year

NET TRACK '16 (000) '15 (000) % +/-
Fox Daytona 11,357 13,363 -15%
Fox Atlanta 6,800 9,507 -28%
Fox Las Vegas 7,228 7,739 -7%
Fox Phoenix 6,633 6,972 -5%
Fox Auto Club 6,809 7,254 -6%
FS1 Martinsville 4,232 4,061 4%
Fox Texas 4,339 4,842 -10%
Fox Bristol* 5,456 N/A N/A
Fox Richmond^ 4,700 5,188 -8%
Fox Talladega 6,656 6,312 5%
FS1 Kansas 3,142 2,480 27%
FS1 Dover 3,985 3,940 1%
Fox Charlotte 5,731 6,408 -11%
FS1 Pocono** N/A 3,614 N/A
FS1 Michigan 3,451 3,519 -2%
FS1 Sonoma 3,896 3,723 5%

* Race in 2015 ran on Fox from 2:31-2:43pm. Weather then delayed until 6:30pm. Coverage finished on FS1 from 6:30-10:30pm.
^ Race in 2015 rained out on Saturday night, run on Sunday afternoon.
** Race in 2016 rained out on Sunday, run on Monday.
Source: Austin Karp, SportsBusiness Daily


Why are Fox and NASCAR executives encouraged? Because the TV performance generally stabilized after those first two races, viewership increased among the 18- to 49-year-old demographic, and FS1 saw a 6 percent viewership jump from last year, when Fox’s 10-year media rights extension with NASCAR began.

“What I’m most proud of for this year is the fact that [while] we started with two of our biggest races down … to be able to close that gap … that’s a great storyline for us,” said Brent Dewar, chief operating officer of NASCAR.

NASCAR’s new low downforce racing package was also widely hailed, as it made for parity, passing and more photo finishes than had been seen in the sport in years.

“We’re encouraged by that. We absolutely believe it has been giving us a boost,” Dewar said.

Perhaps the brightest spot for Fox is the jump it saw in younger viewers and those engaged digitally. In addition to across-the-board increases for the hard-to-reach 18-49 demo, the Fox Sports Go streaming app posted a 27 percent jump in unique streams and a 49 percent jump in minutes streamed around races.

“I still see it as a sport that is winning most weekends that it’s on,” said Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports senior vice president of programming and research. “It does a bigger audience week in and week out than anything out there except for the NFL. It’s still a really significant part of our overall business.”

The sport’s team and brand executives also say NASCAR’s ratings so far this season do not concern them. “I’ve not personally had any conversation where TV has been a concern,” Neale Hood, director of sales and marketing of Furniture Row Racing, said of his business development efforts this year.

Furniture Row Racing is touting social, digital numbers to sponsors.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
“Look at how much NASCAR has done on the social and digital platforms — it’s massive, and they have some strong numbers,” Hood said. “Once I put that information in front of sponsors, there’s really not a concern.”

Jim McCoy agreed. McCoy is director of sports marketing for Nationwide, which sponsors the sport’s most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

“As we look at ROI, ratings and on-track performance are inputs to that — but they’re not the only inputs,” McCoy said. “As we look at the [business-to-business] efforts we have in place, the social/digital impressions that we’re generating — they all play a factor in providing a positive ROI for our NASCAR program, which we continue to see.”

NASCAR backers are pleased with the optimistic signs seen throughout the season, thanks to races like NBC Sports’s season-opener, the Coke Zero 400, which posted its best numbers since 2011.

“It’s tempting to look at year over year and go point to point,” said Doug Perlman, founder and chief executive of Sports Media Advisors, which consults with NASCAR. “But if you allow yourself to take a step back, and focus on those two variables — how strong they are week in and week out, and how they are doing from a cross-platform perspective — I think that’s the most important piece of the picture.”

Fox’s Mulvihill agreed.

“We started the year in a really tough place; Jeff Gordon had retired and come to our booth, and Tony Stewart was not in action,” he said. “Once we started to work our way through that transitional period, we saw the story get better as the year went on.”

NASCAR saw some gains this season on the digital front, where it averaged 1.3 million unique visitors per day across its home page and apps, roughly flat from last year, and 2.4 million engaged Twitter users per race, up 24 percent from last year, according to sources. This included a record amount of social engagement around the Daytona 500.

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