Just as one high-profile fight around sports viewership metrics is calming down, another one is beginning.
Netflix said it attracted a global average audience of 36.6 million for last weekend’s boxing match between Terence Crawford and Canelo Alvarez, a bout that also set a series of attendance and gate records in Las Vegas. That streaming audience included an average minute audience of 20.3 million viewers in the U.S.
Those metrics, however, were the result of a combination of internal, non-audited data and measurement from VideoAmp, a challenger to Nielsen that has not received accreditation from the Media Ratings Council. The process used by Netflix was the same as one used last fall for its live stream of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight, metrics that were dismissed by many others in the business of sports as not particularly reliable.
Along similar lines, the Netflix number for a boxing match happening after midnight early Sunday on the U.S. East Coast on a subscription-based streaming service was similar to the average of 33.8 million for last weekend’s Super Bowl rematch. That NFL game was played late on a Sunday afternoon with two of the league’s most popular teams and was fundamentally based on broadcast television.
As a result, Netflix’s claim, to some, does not make sense.
“The Eagles-Chiefs number is pretty good, but just imagine if it had been on at 1 a.m. and measured by VideoAmp,” tweeted Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill.
Mulvihill has also been an outspoken critic of YouTube’s measurement process and subsequent revision of the audience from its NFL game on Sept. 5 from Brazil. His boss, Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks, had a similar rebuke of YouTube at Tuesday’s Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York, highlighting some of the still-outstanding issues around garnering reliable viewership data in streaming.
“Just like YouTube, we will continue to revise those numbers up until we can no longer revise them anymore,” Shanks joked at the summit.
Netflix did use an accredited Nielsen measurement for its NFL doubleheader last Christmas, drawing an average audience of more than 24 million that remains a league streaming record.
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