I am not 100% sure but I think the most watched MLS regular season game was Freddy Adu's debut on ABC in 2004 which was a 1.3 rating. Your guess is as good as mine as to if or when these old records will ever be broken.
coolio. How about a graph with all of them and your axis being "game 1," game 2" etc. That way we can see any trends across all broadcasts. You could even do one that focuses on trends across all based on time slot.
I've actually attempted the first one before, but it was a pain in the rear due to the website I'm using. I will likely give it another go at either the end of regular season or as part of a season summary. Also, very good idea about time slots. I had never thought of that.
Is there any reason to differentiate between the ESPN and ESPN2 ratings? Does ESPN consider, say, a 300K viewership to be good for ESPN2, but mediocre for ESPN? In this day and age, is it really easier to draw on the main channel? This seems critical to understanding the extent to which ratings are really growing.
In general for most sports/events, the more important the game/event, the more likely you will see it on ESPN. It has been that way for since ESPN2 debuted. So by definition because ESPN gets better games than ESPN2, they tend to get better ratings as well.
Thanks. If the only reason that ratings are higher on ESPN is because they tend to put more attractive matchups on the main channel, this suggests that for purposes of evaluating MLS' strength as a TV product, we can combine its ratings across ESPN and ESPN2. And this suggests that ratings are most definitely up. That seems to be corroborated by Jack Bell's recent piece on MLS ratings in the Times:
Yup, I think it makes perfect sense to combine and the compare. We do this combination in the summary I periodically post. https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/threads/mls-tv-ratings.1914571/page-84#post-26218999
So basically, you're basically using evidence that the teams don't matter as much as the lead-in and the time of day and the day of the week to show that the teams do matter. That's some bitchin' cognitive dissonance there.
Cognitive dissonance by the particular poster perhaps, but I'd agree that lead-in seems to be a pretty important aspect of ratings thusfar.
There's a technical communication professor that I had in as an undergrad who would've shithammered me for using the word "basically" even once in that post, let alone for using it as gratuitously as I did use it. What I've gathered from this season's ratings are the following things matter: 1. Time of day and day of week. 2. The lead-in. Who's playing and where the game is being played matter to a certain extent, but not as much as has been implied in the past.
USOC Final was probably watched more than 2x online than on TV. I remember that Sounders semifinal against Chivas was watched by 37,000+ on Sounders live-stream.
That's pretty similar to most things on TV. Those things are important. But there are few teams/players/races that can truly move the needle, especially when it comes to overcoming challenges of #1 and #2 above. Somewhere I have the game-by-games for like 2001 or 2002 on ESPN and there was a bump when New York played, and if New York played Chicago, there was a bump. But I don't recall if everything else was constant or not. (Okay, just checked, it was 2002. 18 Saturday 4pm ET telecasts averaged a .20 rating on ESPN2. Top-rated were Chicago at Dallas, DC United at San Jose, MetroStars at Chicago, MetroStars at Chicago (again), Columbus at San Jose and Chicago at DC United. Lowest-rated were Los Angeles at Colorado, Colorado at Los Angeles, New England at Columbus, Los Angeles at Chicago and New England at MetroStars.)
I think we are learning more about the ratings this year because if I am not mistaken, this is the very first year we have ever had the chance to see individual ratings on a weekly basis and study them. In the past we were lucky to get some random summary of ratings at the end of the season and people would have to make poorly educated guesses on what was going on.