Worldwide TV Ratings for the 2010 UEFA Champions League Final

The reach of this year's Champions league final could be anywhere between 200-300 million viewers. The fact that it was on a Saturday for the first time ever should help in some regions despite the absence of the top English and Spanish clubs.

It's estimated there're about 1.4 billion TV households in the world. China is by far the largest television market in the world with close to 400 million tv households, followed by India (130m) and the USA (115m). However, considered as a single entity, the European Union would be the second largest tv market with more than 200 million tv households.

Here's a breakdown by region:

Approximate TV households (in millions)
Asia Pacific .................730m (China 400m, India 130m)
Europe East/West ........310m (EU 200m, Russia 52)
Latin America/Caribbean 140m (Brazil 50m)
North America .............130m (USA 115m)
Africa/Middle East ........115m



Here's my estimate. I'll use 3 or 4 persons/household in my calculations:

Asia .............. 2% of households -> 14.6m * 4 ~ 58m viewers
Europe .......... 15% -> 46.5m * 2.5 ~ 116m viewers
L.America ....... 5% -> 7m * 3 ~ 21m viewers
Africa/M.E....... 10% -> 11.5m * 3 ~ 34m viewers

Total worldwide tv viewers: ~ 230million

Worldwide out-of-home viewing tv audience (pubs, bars, public viewing, private parties, etc) ~ 2-10m viewers.

DVRs are becoming increasingly popular and could add more viewers.

Online viewers should be in the millions as well. Last year in the USA 2 million people watched the final online, the same number of people that watched it live on tv.



Overall reach of the CL final, about ~ 250 million viewers.
Overall reach of the Euro final, about ~ 350 million viewers.
Overall reach of the World Cup final, about ~ 700-800 million viewers.

 

Well, Initiative claims it collects data from 85% of the world’s TV households in 54 countries. But really that figure it's more like 70% since in some of those countries they don't get data from all metro areas.

So we could have a reasonable estimate by getting whatever numbers they provide and adding an extra 30%. So for instance, if they claim 100m viewers worldwide, this would really mean 130m viewers worldwide.

So for those CL numbers you provided:

100m average viewers ---> 130m average viewers
200m total (reach) viewers ---> 260m total (reach) viewers

And we still aren't counting out-of-home, bars, DVRs, and online viewers!



Remember, Initiative "only uses audited, robust figures supplied by reputable agencies as Nielsen in the USA" and the USA has the most sophisticated daily tv ratings system there is. They use 5,000 households for national ratings from all 210 tv markets, and another 20,000 electronic meters in the 55 largest US tv markets. Sure, it's not truly random, since only those that actually accept to participate are used as the sample size, so therefore, it's not truly a representative sample, it's bias, it's not accurate enough, 99.98% of American households have no input at all, etc, etc, etc. It's far from perfect, but it's the best we have. Some other countries don't even have that.

 

US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina
Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey
South Africa
China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines
Australia, New Zealand