The Kansas City Chiefs vs. Los Angeles Chargers game in Brazil was anticipated to set new streaming records as YouTube's first exclusive free NFL broadcast. With a high-profile team like the Chiefs involved, expectations for massive viewership naturally ran high. However, the actual numbers fell short of what many had predicted.
According to Variety.com's Jennifer Maas, YouTube drew a global average audience of 17.3 million for its live coverage of Friday's game. However, Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio views the figures as somewhat low.
In his column on NBC Sports on Monday, he wrote:
"The first-ever YouTube free stream of a regular-season game did well, as expected. It didn’t do as well as I personally had expected."
While these numbers are strong and surpass the 14.2 million who watched the first Friday night game of the 2024 season, Packers-Eagles on Peacock, Florio was still taken aback by the figure for such a high-profile matchup.
"It just seems odd that a game involving the high-profile Chiefs didn’t do more than 16.2 million viewers in the U.S. — or more than 1.1 million in all other countries combined," he wrote.
The context, as noted by Florio, includes the fact that Peacock is a paid streaming service, making YouTube's free broadcast a more accessible option for fans. Nielsen has also introduced a new measurement system for counting out-of-home viewers, which tends to inflate numbers compared to previous years.