Millions of people watched NFL football on Twitter again.
More than two million people watched the NFL on Twitter (again)
But the average Twitter audience for NFL football jumped 34 percent for the Patriots-Texans Thursday night game.
Adam Glanzman/Getty Images
For the second straight week, more than two million people watched part of the NFL’s Thursday Night football game for free on Twitter — this one, a matchup between the New England Patriots and Houston Texans.
Specifically, 2.2 million people watched the game, just a bit more than the 2.1 million who tuned in last week for Twitter’s NFL livestreaming debut. Yes, that’s still a much smaller audience than the NFL gets on TV — roughly 17.5 million people saw the game last night on television — but it’s not an insignificant audience, either.
To be clear, that 2.2 million accounts for the total view, or what Nielsen might call the cumulative view, of all the people who tuned in at one point during the game. TV ratings, however, average how many viewers a program had within a specified time frame of about a minute. In this case, that was 327,000 for Twitter, which is up 34 percent from the 243,000 it averaged last week.
Those numbers aren’t bad considering the game was a blowout. The Patriots crushed the Texans, 27-0.
The feeling inside Twitter was that yesterday’s game would generate a bigger audience than last week’s thanks to the popularity of the New England Patriots, one of the league’s most polarizing teams. But the game was all but over midway through the third quarter, so it’s a little surprising the Twitter audience had a bit of a spike over last week.
Twitter’s next streaming game is Oct. 6, when the San Francisco 49ers take on the Arizona Cardinals.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
