NASCAR Television Ratings: It’s Bad, But There Is A Bright Spot
We look at the television ratings from the Folds of Honor Quick Trip 500 weekend from Atlanta Motor Speedway. There is no way to sugar coat it, they were historically bad.
Ok, last week I told you I want to start with something positive so here you go. This week there was only a 22% drop off from the Xfinity Series race to the Camping World Truck Series race. In Daytona there was a 33% increase on Saturday from Friday night. Unfortunately the reality is the 1.4 million viewers the Xfinity race drew was the same as the Camping World Truck Series race from Daytona.
Related Story: Good, Bad and Very Ugly From Atlanta
I had said that after the big drop in Daytona 500 ratings a flat week in Atlanta would be good. Well it was not flat, it actually was the opposite of flat, it was a cliff and the ratings fell off it. The Folds of Honor Quick Trip 500 garnered a 4.2 rating down from last years 5.1,
Traditionally the race following Daytona is the second highest of the season working off the excitement of the Great American Race. This year the malaise of the Daytona 500 carried over to Atlanta. Before Sunday, the lowest rated second race of the year was in Phoenix when it received a 4.8 in 2014. The highest being 2005 when the race from Auto Club Speedway earned a 7.1, higher than this year’s Daytona 500.
Network NASCAR races, even in the their current decline, have been the highest rated sports program on a normal weekend. This weekend the NBA held that honor (briefly) with a regular season game between Steph Curry’s Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder. However, after the overnight numbers came in the NASCAR race from Atlanta took the honors as being the most-watched sporting event of the weekend.
Heading into March Madness and the final stretch of the NBA season with the Warriors trying to get to a record 73 wins, it is only going to get tougher to attract America’s eyeballs. Not to mention a 2016 NBA playoffs that could be very compelling with what looks like a very competitive Western Conference and turbulent Lebron James and the Cavs coming out of the East. Throw in the Masters and the lead up to the summer Olympics the landscape for NASCAR looks difficult heading into the summer.
The good news for NASCAR from the weekend comes in the form of digital and social media metrics. NASCAR Digital (NASCAR.com and the NASCAR Mobile App) accumulated 1.6 million unique visitors on race day, while content on the NASCAR Facebook page reached 13.2 million on race day, an increase of nearly 50% year-over-year. This is coming on the heels of a banner day for NASCAR social and digital media during the Daytona 500, which set a record for most social impressions generated in one day by NASCAR’s social channels. Race day impressions also increased by 63 percent versus last year’s Daytona 500.
So now we look forward to Las Vegas.
The 2015 race in Las Vegas actually showed a small year over year gain. With what has happened this year so far, I would have to say that any drop of less than ten percent would be a success. The challenge in getting that stands in the fact that if it does only drop ten percent, that still would be a nice increase from Atlanta. There is the wild card factor of the endorsement of Trump by NASCAR’s Brian France. The entrance of politics into sport tend to hurt ratings more than they help, but with Trump who knows.
More racing: NASCAR And Fox Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves After What They Did In Atlanta
Lets see if NASCAR can come up aces in Vegas, or they continue mostly rolling snake eyes.