FOX - Super Bowl ratings rise 1% from last year with bump from Rihanna

Super Bowl viewing might be back in vogue. Sunday's Fox ( NASDAQ: FOX ) ( NASDAQ: FOXA ) telecast of Super Bowl LVII drew an average 113M viewers , about a 1% increase from the NBC telecast in 2022.

Last year's game, of course was a rebound from the 2021 game, which had the lowest Super Bowl ratings in 13 years . The 2021 game matched up the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, while last year featured the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals.

Sunday saw the Chiefs back in the game to face off against the Philadelphia Eagles, and (as these kinds of things affect ratings) the game was close, until a last-minute winning kick by the Chiefs to prevail 38-35.

The current fast numbers measure viewership across Fox, Fox Deportes, and various digital properties of Fox and the National Football League. Last year brought a change in the measurement of streaming, counting people where previous years had counted devices.

This year's game also drew interest for its halftime show, featuring pop star Rihanna's first public performance in five years (which featured something of a surprise in revealing a new pregnancy). Fox notes thwhen viewing peaked , with 118.7M viewers on average.

If there was a unifying story of the Super Bowl's ads this year, it was the ongoing power of celebrity. We saw attention-getting appearances from John Travolta for T-Mobile ( TMUS ); Ben Affleck (and Jennifer Lopez) for Dunkin', Steve Martin for Pepsi ( PEP ); Serena Williams (for Michelob Ultra ( BUD ) and Rémy Martin ( OTCPK:REMYY )); and Meghan Trainor for Pringles, among others.

They and other advertisers will be looking to reap the bounty of viewers in the shopping days ahead (even on down years, the Super Bowl ends up tens of millions of viewers better than the year's No. 2 broadcast).

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