On Thursday, Dec. 6, Chad Finn of The Boston Globe posted a lengthy article that highlighted the strong household TV ratings enjoyed by the Patriots this season, which included the following chart.
At first glance, it may seem that more people watched regular season Patriots games than watched the Red Sox in the World Series in the Boston DMA (designated market area). But this is not accurate, and here’s why.
Ratings measure the average number of households or people that Nielsen credits with watching during an average quarter-hour.
Reach is the metric that Nielsen uses to determine how many unique households or people tuned in during the entire broadcast.
The chart below ranks the same games by reach. We added the Reach column on the right (highlighted in blue), along with the three additional World Series games not listed in the Globe’s chart (highlighted in yellow), to show how almost every Red Sox World Series game (except Game 4) was watched by more unique households than the top-rated Patriots regular season games.
You might ask, then what about the Super Bowl?
The Super Bowl is an iconic one-time sporting event that is watched by the world, especially here in Boston when the Patriots are playing, as they have seven times in the past 17 years. The World Series happens to be a four- to seven-game sporting event, which the Red Sox have been in four times in the past 15 years. According to Nielsen, in the Boston DMA, the unduplicated reach of this year’s five World Series games featuring the Red Sox surpasses that of the 2018 Super Bowl featuring the Patriots. (This is highlighted in green in the chart below.)
