I heard on 93.7 The Fan this morning Ron Cook and Joe Starkey talking about local viewership for Steeler games has declined 10% and that attendance continues to go down as well. People calling in to the show were pretty much all universal on why the decline. The product is not the same as it had been in the past. Undisciplined, poorly prepared, not aggressive, not the tough physical team they once were. People just feel like its the same old same old so why invest any time and money.
I will add this and this is just my opinion to be clear. When attendance continues to dwindle and now they say viewership declines, this hits Art II in his pocketbook and that is what I think will bring change. And you add in interest in the team fading somewhat, that should get his attention.
Yeah, this came up during Dale Lolley’s Q&A session. I believe Cook mentioned PIT was ranked 29th. It’s behind a pay wall at DKSports
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Lolley shot it down. I’m paraphrasing but basically PIT is one of only two teams (NYG is the other) that counts attendance by turnstile body count, and not tickets sold. In fact, all games have been sellouts for some time. For 2021 the numbers indicated PIT attendance was the highest in team history (approx 544,400). Obviously, there is one more game included for this year. But, the last year they had attendance (2019), they didn’t even break 500k. Their average for 2021 was 60,488, whereas there average in 2013 was 57,323. (Before they enclosed the open end IIRC).
I will add this notion that viewership collation is different than it was two years ago because of streaming services. So the traditional calculation is obsolete. More people use streaming and will continue to do so once the cable/Satellite mediums control of the networks expire. Fox and CBS already have their streaming services showing games and NBC and ESPN has had theirs up for a year now. AmazonPrime will carry games too. SundayTicket will be leaving DirecTV after 2022 and it’s pto able it will be through the NFL’s own streaming platform as well.
If anything, NFL Football viewership is INCREASING because of the saturation into other types of markets. I mean they are showing the games on Nickelodeon live in the format for kids. UK viewership is huge and Germany has had a huge following since NFL Europe.