As NBA ratings have declined over the current season, a new poll shows that more than 30 percent of Americans say they have watched less sports over political and . Racing, like basketball and other sports, has seen year-to-year ratings decline. That marks a 10% decline compared to the year-ago 87.1 million viewers, and a 16% drop compared to the analogous period during the 2018-19 campaign. Covered race cars from the NASCAR Xfinity Series sit parked on pit road during a rain delay before the start . They are included along with social media engagement, streaming, and the like. NASCAR's social media channels have piled up nearly 2 billion social impressions (the number of times its content was viewed) and more than 92 million fan engagements (retweets, likes, shares). Johnson is getting some commiserations from the fans after the ratings came out. Dale Earnhardt Jr. retired at the end of the 2017 season. It would have been nice to have heard more during the championship race from Earnhardt. In NASCAR's pre-1990s heyday, when it was still very much a regional sport, manufacturer identity was a big thing. And while 2020 has been anything but usual especially in the sports world, NASCAR was the one sport that didnt suffer a significant ratings drop. Created and Designed by, Solving NASCARs Racetrack Problem, Part 2 Happy Hour Motor Speedway, on What Caused The Decline of NASCAR? The 2019 season was run as regularly scheduled as well. . That isnt insignificant when it comes to explaining the decline of NASCAR. Viewership for the 2019 Phoenix race was 22% lower than in 2018. but the mainstream media claiming the political/social justice shift in sports has nothing to do with the decline in viewership are whistling past the graveyard. Nothing against Jimmie Johnson for winning titles with the rules as written, but he only managed that feat twice. In fact, the current car lends itself to some pretty good racing. Anyone who was watching then could tell you that wasnt unusual at all. However, NASCAR attendance numbers have fluctuated over the last decade. I have reasons to believe that NASCAR can return to previous levels of popularitymaybe not on the verge of overtaking the NFL again, but at least back to a point where they have enough of a dedicated fanbase to be a solid performer in ratings and ticket sales. And based on what we see today, NASCAR seems to be on an upward trajectory and shows no signs of slowing down. OutKick reported: The NBA ratings are worse The . Stats. NASCAR moved the Brickyard 400 to September . So NASCAR racing has become just like European formula-car racing and IndyCar racing in North America. Compared to the fourth Xfinity race of last season, from Phoenix, ratings fell a tick (from 0.8) but viewership increased (from 1.19M). And that is for the Indianapolis 500 of stock cars. The NASCAR Cup Series race at Auto Club Speedway averaged 4.315 million average viewers on FOX last weekend. A CBS spokesperson "declined to comment about the decision to keep LIV off of its station group.". The 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season averaged 2.93 million viewers across FOX, FS1, NBC and NBCSN, down 4% from last year (3.06M), down 6% from 2019 (3.11M) and the least-watched season on record. The truth was of course far from that. The Monday portion of that race averaged a 4.2 and 7.03 million, compared to a 6.2 and 10.94 million for the first 20 laps on Sunday before weather rolled in. But in a relatively short time, NASCAR corrected the car and the multiple issues with its design, and while the cars dont differ by manufacturer like they once did, at least were not seeing disastrously awful races just because of the cars construction. By: GP Racing. In 2007, an average of 16.4 million viewers tuned in to watch The Daytona 500, but by 2014 that number had fallen by more than 50% to an average of 8.3 million viewers per race. It is now an elitist sport because only those who can afford to pay to play need apply. The XFL's ratings were disappointing in Week One. They do not want to watch commercials over and over again. This means that fewer televisions are being turned on around the country; however, the percentage of those people watching NASCAR is increasing. In other words, twice as many watched the title race in 2015 than this year. Photo credit: sidehike on Visual hunt / CC BY-SA Now72 years old, the racing organization has managed to evolve through the decades in order to meet the changing trends, technology, and preferences that directly affect the sport. Just ten years later, there were 13 such eventsnearly half the schedule. Compared to Week 2 of last year's USFL, which consisted of two games on broadcast and two on cable, the XFL's Week 2 audience was down just slightly (661K to 655K). Ill never forget seeing Elliott Sadlers terrifying end-over-end crash at Talladega in 2003 and seeing it again in every single ad for Talladega races for the next 3-4 years. It may seem good on the surface, but there's more beneath that makes this concerning. The sport no longer has Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Jimmie Johnson, so theres an opportunity for new fan favorites to emerge, formed by on-track performance rather than sentiment. Photo credit: PresidenBertho on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA Goldco (Most trusted and best gold IRA company overall) Birch Gold Group (Best selection of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium) Augusta Precious Metals. . Those numbers of course, dont tell the entire story. All eight CBS-owned CW affiliates have "declined to air" LIV Golf's tournaments, according to Rice & Hayes of DEADLINE. Danica turned out to be a huge bustas many people who followed the sport closely, including yours truly, predicted she would be. The news sort of heads downhill from there. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The decision . After sweeping claims of a toxic work environment throughout 2020, the star and her show have been scrambling to make things right. Fox sees 12% decline over last year's ratings: Fox and FS1 for its package of 15 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series races this season averaged 4.9 million viewers, down 12% from 5.6 million last . Its not so much that the points reset NASCAR introduced in 2004 was a monumentally stupid idea. As streaming services provide instant entertainment whileNASCARhas scheduled andlengthy race events,thecomparison is similar toordering drive-thru (cheap and convenient) versusdining at a fine restaurant (pricier and takes longer before you can eat). Gordon wasnt the only driver who turned in a spectacular season-long performance only to have it nullified. Most TV consumption, really all TV consumption of TV of tier one sports properties is down simply because TV consumption just broadly is down. IndyCar always has side-by-side commercials during green flag racing. In NASCARs pre-1990s heyday, when it was still very much a regional sport, manufacturer identity was a big thing. By then, hardly anyone will have a standard TV, anyway, because every event will be streamed, and ratings wont matter. Having followed the sport in the time frame when it began, I can offer what I believe are the real reasons for the decline of NASCAR. These are bold changes, but this variety of tracks will test drivers and teams at every level. It took quite a few years of longtime fans bitching about that, but NASCAR did finally move the Labor Day Southern 500 back to Darlington. However, NASCAR has been taking major strides as the on-track product is improving, the schedule is being changed, bold decisions are being made, and communication between each party is better. NASCAR TV ratings were once the darlings of the sport. Its largely forgotten now, because the sports current elimination format playoff system at least had some thought put into it. Yes, thats actually true; read it again if you need to. Most die-hard fans of NASCAR are those that have followed it the longest. It may seem good on the surface, but theres more beneath that makes this concerning. Which might explain why, despite the denials, the people who are descendants of Big Bill France, the man who started it all, are quietly shopping the company around and hoping to get out while the goings good. He is likely to build a fan base fast. When you think of the venues that have showcased the most memorable events in the sports history, Daytona, Darlington, and Bristol often come to mind. Yet instead of focusing their marketing on Johnsons unequaled supremacy, NASCAR chose to put all of their marketing eggs into the Danica Patrick basket, believing a swimsuit model who could drive a racecar would save the sport. And as recently as 2013, the race drew 16.5. You could say it was NASCARs New Coke, except Coca-Cola was smart enough to change the formula back in response to furious customer backlash. And those ways that didnt always involve traditional broadcast TV. One shining example was a 2010 Dover racea playoff race, no lesswhere ESPN broke away with 11 laps to go in a very much undecided event for an ad break. They wouldn't explain ratings declines from 2016 to 2017. You couldnt entirely blame NASCAR for no longer holding events in places like North Wilkesboro or Rockingham or even Darlington, which lost a race on the schedule for several years. Is PNC Park The Best Ballpark in Baseball? Fortunately, NASCAR is finally addressing this. Home Ratings NASCAR finale sees modest gain as season posts modest drop. Well, it might be as easy as the product fans are seeing on their televisions over the course of a race. NASCAR moved away from tracks where drivers push and shove and fight both other racecars and the track, and moved to aero-dependent speedways where engineers in the garage determined winners. While this already marks the third time that NASCAR has seen the average viewership go down, there is one major positive to take away from it. The season averaged 2.866 million sans-Daytona, down 1% from last year (2.91M) and a fraction of a percent from 19 (2.871M). The same story goes for NASCAR as the adverts that major companies place during their televised races are a major source of income for the organization and the teams. The XFL's ratings were disappointing in Week One. That exposure now comes not just from TV, but through streaming platforms, attendance, and even social media. No longer do young NASCAR racers start at their local tracks and work their way up. (It did.) Lack of manufacturer identity may have been a reason some hardcore fans left the sport in the early 1990s, but that doesnt seem to me to be a valid reason for the sports popularity plunge since 2005. Gordon scored the most points overall of any driver in 2004, 2007, and 2014. (It wasnt a tough call to make, if you actually looked at her results instead of her figure.). If they hadnt, youd probably be reading articles today about the decline of Coca-Cola too. These figures paint a troubling trend that NASCAR is on a long term downtrend it has yet to recover from. NASCARs popularity is down and the ratings reflect it. It would have saved a lot of time. NASCAR averaged 4.570 million viewers for Sunday afternoon's event at Auto Club Speedway. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images). That. Elliott is a great driver and a likable kid, and he doesnt take any craphe doesnt shy away from wrecking a driver like Denny Hamlin if the situation called for it. The previous days Xfinity Series finale drew a 0.6 (flat) and 1.01 million (+3%) on NBCSN and last Fridays Truck Series finale drew a 0.30 (+3%) and 473,000 (-4%) on FS1. Statistics for NASCAR indicate that 63% are male, 20% are minorities and 47% are between the ages of 18 and 44, with the majority of this age bracket being in the older end, the number of which is also dropping yearly. Next:10 NASCAR Drivers With The Most Wins (& How Much They Won). Yes, all of those factors might have contributed to the decline of interest in NASCAR, But, in the end, I think the franchise system and the ride-buying are what did NASCAR in. The future of IndyCar seems to be brighter when it comes to younger people. Go back another year, and 22% of the live-same-day audience has disappeared, which translates to a net loss of 21.3 million TV viewers per night. . However, like Johnsons dominance, I doubt that this would have been as much of a problem were it not for other factors that were far more damaging. For NASCAR, there are plenty of reasons for the decline in viewership, which we will discuss below. The NFL only went down 9%, but please, tell me about anthem kneelers. By virtue of his fathers untimely passing, Dale Earnhardt Jr. instantly found himself with a larger fan base than any three drivers in NASCAR. HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA - NOVEMBER 17: Kyle Busch, driver of the #18 M&M's Toyota, celebrates after [+] winning the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Ford EcoBoost 400 and the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship at Homestead Speedway on November 17, 2019 in Homestead, Florida. Advertising and sponsorship deals are the lifeblood of spectator sports, that is why the TV spots for the Superbowl are some of the most expensive in television. Related:15 Abandoned And Forgotten NASCAR Race Tracks. Its possible that the most popular driver not performing well hurt the sport, given the sports fan demographic. Photo credit: royal_broil on Best Running / CC BY-SA NASCAR tv ratings for the Bristol Motor Speedway dirt track. Maybe there is a segment of fans who tune in for death-defying calamities, but that has always been a part of the sport and still is. The decline of NASCAR from dominance started circa 2005, and there wasnt any big change to car specs in that time period. We try to do is take the complex and boil it down to something that is more easily understood by the fanbase.. And we wont get into the murdering of the English language that goes on week after week, ad nauseum. The Great Recession that swept across the landscape starting in 2008 changed everything. People rooted for car brands as well as drivers, and car companies believed in the whole win on Sunday, sell on Monday mantra. (Photo by ISC Images & Archives via Getty Images), ISC Archives/CQ-Roll Call Group via Getty Images, landscape. Then they sharply declined in Week Two.The four XFL games in Week Two averaged 665,000 viewers, which is a 50 percent decline from the four XFL . And while some ran their own cars, most were independent contractors who had their expenses paid by their car owner and then split the winnings (that division of money was usually 60-40) with said owner, who paid the bills. On the other hand, NASCAR will go to full-screen commercials on a regular basis which affects the way a fan can follow the race. Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series race from Las Vegas averaged a 2.6 rating and 4.36 million viewers on FOX, marking the lowest rated edition of the race since it debuted in 1998 and the smallest audience since at least 2001 (viewership prior to 2002 was not available). Comments Off on What Caused The Decline of NASCAR? NASCAR possessed one of the greatest dynasties in the history of sports during Jimmies reign. NASCAR looks beyond declining attendance, TV ratings They were even more upset when NASCAR changed its playoff system in January 2014 to create a winner-take-all race among four drivers in. NASCAR Home. Furthermore, their retirements are probably not the sole reason for NASCAR's viewership issues either. 500 MOMENTUM:Daytona 500 TV ratings: NASCAR opener ends two-year viewership decline. The Daytona Road Course averaged 4.750 million viewers during the event. The NASCAR season ended on a slightly better note in the ratings, though the season could not quite measure up. NASCAR scraped bottom. NFLX You can contact him here or on the Sports Media Watch Twitter page. Compared to last years fourth race of the season, Phoenix, ratings fell a tick (from 2.7) and viewership 5% (from 4.58M). That would have a big effect on viewership overall. 1) Just like all the other major racing series in the world, NASCAR has become a money deal. Then they sharply declined in Week Two. or Disney plus; there's more competition for those eyeballs then there's ever been. This year's NCAA tournament ratings were down 11%. NASCAR TV Ratings Below are the ratings for the NASCAR Cup Series: Date | Track | Network | Viewers | Ratings June 20, 2021 Nashville Superspeedway NBCSN Viewers: 2,600,000 Ratings: 1.46 June 13, 2021 Texas Motor Speedway FS1 Viewers: 2,735,000 Ratings: 1.64 June 6, 2021 Sonoma Raceway FS1 Viewers: 2,494,000 Ratings: 1.49 May 30, 2021 But for whatever reason, Junior not only didnt measure up to his fathers formidable reputation, he rarely even established himself as a contender. In the past NASCAR has tried to educate fans who might look at ratings and think the sport is in trouble and help them understand that things arent as bad as they seem. Most notably, Sunday was an all-time low in viewership for the second race of a NASCAR season ever. The previous two races the Daytona Roval and Homestead-Miami posted double-digit increases over the same Cup Series stops last season, but those races had the benefit of moving up from the lower-rated summer portion of the schedule. The fan backlash was loud and intense. (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images). It could be just Mike Joy and Jeff Gordon up in the booth, which would sound like a library compared to NBC.). Standings. Atlanta has had some classics, but that was partly by virtue of the venue hosting the championship race, such as Alan Kulwickis unforgettable title win in 1992. Im also someone who became a disenchanted former fan myself. Brian Herbst is the senior vice president for media and productions for NASCAR. Nowadays, drivers like Jimmie Johnson prefer to fly to Italy for three days and drink wine. Three of the four drivers in the championship race were also in the 2018 race, and three of the four drivers were in Toyotas. NASCAR's viewership for the first half of the 2022 season is the highest since 2017. Photo credit: balpeck on Best Running / CC BY-SA Related: NASCARs NextGen car shows promise and one huge issue. And one other thing about NASCAR in those days: the races were open to anybody who could qualify. Which meant that other drivers didnt win a lot. But there is a big difference between changing your own spark plugs and battling your way to the front at your local speedway in hopes of catching the attention of a NASCAR car owner and calling up that same NASCAR car owner on the phone and saying two words to him: How much?. With all the different metrics used to measure a sport these days however, it can be complicated. If any single event hastened the decline of NASCAR, it was Indy 2008. NASCAR Fans Rebel Against Confederate Flag Ban. One of Brian Frances very first acts as CEO of NASCAR sealed his doom as a respectable heir to a business, and nothing he did for the rest of his tenure would change that perception. (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images), Samantha and son Brexton pose with the trophy after winning the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship at Homestead Speedway on November 17, 2019 in Homestead, Florida. | I dont often see NASCARs ill-conceived playoff idea as a reason people cite for the decline of NASCAR in articles I read these days, but I promise you, that was not the case when I covered the sport. The last race at. That's the first time in a decade that that has happened, Hebrst said. NASCAR did (and still does) market the possibility of spectacular wrecks. Ratings were like Bible verses, an almighty Gospel preached to stakeholders on how much of NASCAR was reaching the masses. All that said, the unveiling of the Car of Tomorrow in 2007 certainly didnt help. Even more so than in baseball, the on-screen product is affected with the layout of a track. Feb. 25, 2023, at 5:39 p.m. Farewell, Fontana: NASCAR's Last Weekend at a Racing Gem. I cant imagine any fan of Dale Earnhardt Sr.and there were a lot of themnot wanting to see the sport take every measure it could to keep drivers safe after Daytona 2001. Our share of those TVs that are tuned in is up 18%. NBC did the best with what it was given, really, but there were few compelling storylines. According to reports, the league saw a sharp 50% decline in viewership from week one to the next week.The 3.0 reboot is not going well. Jimmie won a lot. NASCARs viewership continues to fall after the ratings for last weekends race at Auto Club Speedway were released on Tuesday morning. As a racing event that is held in various tracks around the US, there are several venues that fans can choose to go to in order to watch NASCAR live. Admittedly, several of these rule changes have been beneficial to the sport, but some have unfortunately come across as marketing stunts that have turned away fans. 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