I haven't done any analysis myself, but I'd be interested in how those numbers match the overall downward trend of Nielsen viewership numbers as a whole. They don't yet count a lot of the streaming stuff and the audience of streamers and CFB fans is more alike than some other demographics.
If you look at historical trends only using Nielsen ratings, you get a very skewed picture. The below represents it as well as any graph I've seen lately, though it has it's own problems and is for the UK...
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With that said, another proxy for seeing the popularity of the sport is looking at attendance numbers. While obviously not truly representative of viewership, it gives an overall sense of the popularity of the sport. This is pretty dated...
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Here is a great article that tries to demystify the headlines of viewership being down...
We have to be careful with text descriptions of business metrics -- this is true when it's numbers in the news or performance measures in our own
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