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The Kansas City Chiefs are now back-to-back Super Bowl champions. Along with collecting another ring, they once again broke the record for the most-watched Super Bowl of all time.
Super Bowl LVIII drew an audience of 123.4 million viewers on CBS, Nickelodeon, Univision and digital platforms including NFL+. That's up 7% from last year's record audience of 115.1 million on Fox, according to Nielsen data.
CBS led the way with 120 million viewers on the broadcast network alone, marking the largest audience in history for a single network. According to Nielsen, more than 200 million viewers tuned in at least part of the game across networks. This represents a 10% increase on last year's figure of 184 million.
The 2024 game is not only the most-watched Super Bowl of all time, it is now the second-most-watched TV show in history. Primarily, the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, although it was broadcast across multiple networks. It also means that the Chiefs have played and won the two most-watched Super Bowl games of all time.
Earlier this week, Deadline predicted this year's Super Bowl would set a record, given the perfect storm that's been brewing with Taylor Swift at the center of it all.
The NFL had already made gains across the board during the regular season, and its postseason performance was even better. In January, the Chiefs defeated the Baltimore Ravens in the most-watched AFC Championship Series of all time. Given everything the Chiefs had at stake in terms of securing their third Super Bowl win in five years, this was sure to be a highly anticipated game, regardless of the outcome.
Naturally, Swift was able to fly halfway around the world to support Chiefs end Travis Kelce on his big day. The CBS broadcast was somewhat conservative when it came to showing the pop star and her friends on screen during the match, but as proven by the many events she attended that continued to set audience records last year, her influence was unable to… On that. Be credible.
Of the 10 most-watched Super Bowls in history, CBS now holds three of them. The others are Super Bowl 50 (Denver Broncos vs. Carolina Panthers) and Super Bowl XLVII (Baltimore Ravens vs. San Francisco 49ers).
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