Nielsen's August Cable Coverage Estimates

How many households are the cable networks in?

Yesterday, Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand posted the August cable coverage estimates for the English language sports networks. I’m including the Spanish-language networks, and also including networks that use dynamic ad insertion (DAI). John didn’t get into any of the DAI stuff and I don’t blame him. It’s (overly) complicated and most networks don’t use it.

But particularly for networks like TruTV and TUDN which have moved quite a few homes to DAI since December 2022 (and in John’s post January 2023) it makes a real world difference when calculating the declines.

Dec 22 TR below = “December 2022 Traditional”, I’ve included columns for DAI and Total (which is just traditional + DAI).

The declines & percentages are based on the totals, but it’s important to note that *only* the traditional homes are included in national Nielsen measurement (because dynamically inserted ads aren’t national).

But the networks using DAI are still selling advertising to the DAI homes and still collecting monthly carriage fees for those homes.

Perhaps it’s just a summertime thing, but the pace of declines picked up the last couple of month. ESPN shed just over a million households since the June 2023 estimates, and FS1 shed nearly a million.

Though similar numbers for the broadcast networks are not available, there is a way to reverse engineer and arrive at approximate reach numbers. In Q2 the big four networks reach peaked at 71% (~88 million homes) and the CW peaked at 63% (~78 million homes). I don’t have the peak reach percentages for the Spanish-language broadcast networks.

Not all cable networks subscribe to Nielsen measurement. CBS Sports Network and SEC Network are frequently asked about examples of this and that’s why neither is in the chart below and also why you don’t see ratings for those networks…