nino33 wrote: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.
Chicago seems to have a lot of fans. Highest viewings when they're in the finals.