Stanley Cup Finals television ratings

[nino33]

I didn't know until yesterday that wiki had a "Stanley Cup Finals television ratings" page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_C ... on_ratings

I was only a little surprised how low the ratings and small the audience has been.......I was very surprised that 6 of the top 10 rated SCF games ever (including the top 3 & 5 of the top 6) are from the 1970s

[CJ]

I didn't know until yesterday that wiki had a "Stanley Cup Finals television ratings" page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_C ... on_ratings

I was only a little surprised how low the ratings and small the audience has been.......I was very surprised that 6 of the top 10 rated SCF games ever (including the top 3 & 5 of the top 6) are from the 1970s

Wow that's REALLY low! Chicago seems to have a lot of fans. Highest viewings when they're in the finals.

[Bam_Margera]

Do these ratings include when somebody watches via www.nhl.com/tv fka NHL Gamecenter Live (I fear they don't)? Aa lot of people are switching from their cable provider to streaming services and a lot of people in Europe did not have any chance to see NHL hockey in a timely manner before streaming services.

[Primis]

I didn't know until yesterday that wiki had a "Stanley Cup Finals television ratings" page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_C ... on_ratings

I was only a little surprised how low the ratings and small the audience has been.......I was very surprised that 6 of the top 10 rated SCF games ever (including the top 3 & 5 of the top 6) are from the 1970s

Not surprising at all. In the 70's how many viewing options did you have?

By the 80's, satellite TV and cable were really starting to roll out initially in some markets, and channel choices began to go up. In many ways, in the 70's and early 80's, you still had a captive audience.

[nino33]

Not surprising at all. In the 70's how many viewing options did you have?

Well it surprised me! HaHa

There was certainly fewer viewing options, but there was also far less opportunity/access to watch at all.....I would have watched more hockey as a kid if it had been available, but it wasn't; I'd think more viewing options wouldn't necessarily/automatically mean a greater dilution of the numbers watching a particular sport

I haven't looked at other sports (like NFL, MLB the NBA or even the "smaller" sports in NA)...I wonder if they had more viewers in the 1970s and 1980s then they do now? My first guess would be no, they have more now (but that's just a guess)

And the other factor that made it surprising to me is the much greater population now (I've always thought regarding "most popular" musicians in recent times that most did not have the "market share" that they did when I was young, but there raw numbers are almost always much higher now than they were when I was a kid)

The low NHL numbers sure show how hockey is such a small/niche sport


P.S. I'm actually one of those who has "completely cut the cable chord" so for me it's not the more viewing options that's resulted in me watching less hockey; what come to mind is in 1979 it was "13 channels of Adam Oates on the TV to choose from" from Pink Floyd, which by 1992 became "57 Channels and nothing on" (Bruce Springsteen) - the theme being more channels doesn't necessarily make for more worth watching HaHa

[Primis]

I haven't looked at other sports (like NFL, MLB the NBA or even the "smaller" sports in NA)...I wonder if they had more viewers in the 1970s and 1980s then they do now? My first guess would be no, they have more now (but that's just a guess)

Well, the NBA is a bit tougher because it was not handled the same way in the 70's. IIRC they were still TAPE DELAYING NBA Finals games on network TV (late night even, in some cases) into the early 1980's. It wasn't until the mid-80's that it finally took off as a live, televised sport (hi there Michael Jordan, Magic, Larry, and more!). That said... the NBA Finals were pulling awfully good ratings in the 70's sometimes. Or what we consider good ratings now, when we compare them to today's averages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Final ... on_ratings

Take a look at the first bar graph on that link above. Even though the NBA was a very niche sport (even more than the NHL) in the 70's, they still were pulling 10.0 or more ratings for games that were often tape-delayed and not considered priority. Again, there were less eyeballs to go around, but far, FAR less options for those eyeballs to watch.


For MLB and the World Series, Wikipedia's data only goes back to the 1984 Tigers win (I remember THAT year very well obviously). However, regardless you can still see the trend there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Ser ... on_ratings

1984 and 85 were low. 84 was low because the series was over quickly(5 games) and Detroit and San Diego are not huge markets. 1985 was Kansas City and St Louis, even though it went 7 games. And then 1986 was NY Mets and Boston, and ratings went huge (with two huge markets -- keep in mind, Boston = all of New England basically, a huge market) and really shows the power even in the mid-80;s, as it was the most-viewed on that list.


The NFL and Super Bowl are the exception here of course. Football just plain *is* different culturally and socially, and the ratings have been VERY strong since the 1970's and stayed there although you can see a *definite* notable drop in the late 1980's though the early 2000's and it's only in the last 5 or 6 years that the ratinsg have then climbed back up, as the Super Bowl continues to grow as a "big deal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S ... TV_ratings

However, you can almost look at those Super Bowl numbers and figure that the reason they're fairly "steady" is that in reality they should have continued growing (as the NFL and game did in popularity), but more and more options have continued to siphon away eyeballs. So the fact they'r steady actually reflects a MASSIVELY growing popularity of the sport, because every other sports has seen a definite decline in viewership in that same period.


I can't ever discuss TV ratings though without adding this: in truth, Nielsens are a total sham. They take an impossibly-tiny sample size, and scale it way, way up to the point where it can't possibly actually represent the reality. To further this then, Nielsen's monitoring is highly inexact. My cousin has spent years installing equipment for Nielsens in homes, and they literally have to solder or hardwire in to the TV to get the data to then transmit back or collect, and my cousin has often gone in to check on a household only to find that the household is doing something dumb, like say their TV is on for hours and hours transmitting/collecting data but nobody is home, or in older days they would find a household seemed to watch a lot of Channel 3, and would find that it was because they had a video game system hooked up and THAT was what was being done all the time. They try to then implement things where the viewer has to every so often click a button to "stay live", but if you do that viewers then forget to do it, and it skews things anyways.

Now the way Nielsens model works, they have to have specific homes of specific ages, ethnicities, income brackets, family sizes, and such in every area in order to accurately represent that area's demographics. So if even just *one* household has screwed around and messed up things, they either have keep the data knowing it's now flawed and skewed, or they have to throw the data out -- which STILL is going to horribly skew their data for that area because of the tiny sample sizes and their MASSIVE dependence on every single household doing things 100% correctly and they can't just not release ratings for that area because their customers (the TV stations who pay [a lot of money] to be able to use that data to attract advertisers). So they still release the inaccurate ratings so they can keep their customers.


Anyhow, keep this all in mind with the ratings. You can use them to see obvious trends over long-term like we are right now (and they'll be decent enough for that), but beyond that the margin of error is MUCH larger than they would like people to believe or ever realize. A difference of +1.0 might be something a league or team trumpets, but that margin could in fact be simply "statistical noise" and not actually represent anything because of the absolutely miniscule sample size Nielsens use to scale up for their model.


I don't want to bore anyone, but I think it's important people actually realize where Nielsen numbers come from and why they're usually a joke and inaccurate.

[nino33]

Well, the NBA is a bit tougher because it was not handled the same way in the 70's. IIRC they were still TAPE DELAYING NBA Finals games on network TV (late night even, in some cases) into the early 1980's. It wasn't until the mid-80's that it finally took off as a live, televised sport (hi there Michael Jordan, Magic, Larry, and more!). That said... the NBA Finals were pulling awfully good ratings in the 70's sometimes. Or what we consider good ratings now, when we compare them to today's averages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Final ... on_ratings

Take a look at the first bar graph on that link above. Even though the NBA was a very niche sport (even more than the NHL) in the 70's, they still were pulling 10.0 or more ratings for games that were often tape-delayed and not considered priority. Again, there were less eyeballs to go around, but far, FAR less options for those eyeballs to watch.

I've never been an NBA fan (only watched a handful or two of games in my life when I was a kid), but I do know for myself that I was just as "aware of" Dr.J and Kareem and Walt Frazier and Moses Malone (and more) in the 1970s as I was of Jordan, Magic and Larry Bird in the 80s

[nino33]

For MLB and the World Series, Wikipedia's data only goes back to the 1984 Tigers win (I remember THAT year very well obviously). However, regardless you can still see the trend there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Ser ... on_ratings

1984 and 85 were low. 84 was low because the series was over quickly(5 games) and Detroit and San Diego are not huge markets. 1985 was Kansas City and St Louis, even though it went 7 games. And then 1986 was NY Mets and Boston, and ratings went huge (with two huge markets -- keep in mind, Boston = all of New England basically, a huge market) and really shows the power even in the mid-80;s, as it was the most-viewed on that list.

Seems baseball's numbers were actually WAY higher in the 70s and 80s (and even 90s) then they are now http://www.baseball-almanac.com/ws/wstv.shtml

While I watched more baseball as a kid than the NBA, not much more, and I haven't watched baseball in decades (seems I'm not alone!)


As of this summer I'm now more likely to watch football (soccer) than all other sports combined HaHa never imagined that'd ever happen when I was younger

[Asher413]

IMO- it's mostly there are 100's more options now than even 30 years ago. Even in the early 90's, you had maybe 7 options for sports- the 4 networks (and I don't think Fox had sports yet), ESPN, ESPN2 and maybe a local sport channel at most. If you were going to sit and watch TV, there were significantly fewer choices. Even fewer overall choices than today (I want to say we have over 150 actual channels on TV with our current plan, which includes at least 15 full time sports channels, plus streaming this and that.)

Before we had cable (and some people still don't), it was 6 stations, and at least one was PBS. If you wanted to watch TV at all, you had just 6 choices. Much easier to have a higher percentage of viewers when only 6 options exist than 150. Comparing TV ratings between TV eras is a useless exercise. Let's not forget if things like delay viewing (DVR), streaming (Legally or not) or other ways of watching the game may not be counted right today.

[nino33]

Regardless of all the reasoning/comparisons to me hockey's audience is surprisingly small (other methods of determining popularity don't seem to show it in a better light http://www.thehockeynews.com/blog/hocke ... rris-poll/ & here in Canada there's no doubt there's less-and-less people playing and less-and-less people watching)

With players giving back about 15% of their salary year after year via escrow, hockey related revenue doesn't show things in a good light either (the low Canadian dollar affects things too...IIRC Bettman said it cost the League 200 million last year; I also wonder if the TV contract had anything in it about low viewership resulting in less money paid to the NHL?)


But the reason I posted it is I stumbled across the data/had never seen the wiki page before and I was just surprised that the numbers were so low