I love being right. The other week, I wrote about how it looked like this year's Super Bowl could be among the highest-rated of all time. Well, the overnight numbers are in and so far last night’s Super Bowl is shaping up to be one of the highest rated games in decades.
CBS has to be estatic -- they swooped in at the right time to bid for the broadcast rights for this one. This is the first time the network has aired the Super Bowl in six years.
Anyway, according to early Nielsen figures, the Super Bowl drew a 46.4 rating in the top markets. That's about a 10 percent increase over last year's game between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers. While it's not the top-rated Super Bowl of all time (that number is around 49 percent of all televsion households) in this era where it's hard to capture any kind of wide audience, it's a phenominal feat.
Nielsen is now reporting this afternoon that 106.5 million viewers tuned in to the game, making it the most-watched show of all time. M-A-S-H's season fanale, drew 105.97 viewers ... some might say that's a bigger feat because there were quite a fewer number of television sets back then.
All in all advertisers have to be happy with this one. A tight game featuring an under dog pulling out the win at the end kept a record number of viewers watching all the way through -- I'd say that's a $2.7 million well spent for everybody.