FAQ

Where are the ratings for CBS Sports Network? SEC Network? ACC Network? Etc?

Not every network subscribes to the Nielsen service that would include its numbers in the Nielsen national TV ratings. None of the networks referenced above (CBSSN, SECN, ACCN) subscribe to this measurement. Note, these networks are in fact still measured and can order custom reporting from Nielsen. But in that circumstance the networks control the release of the data, i.e., you’ll only see data for a game on CBS Sports Network if CBS decides to release that info to the public.

How can I bypass you and receive all the ratings directly?!

Though it’s usually not phrased as directly, I get this question fairly often. It’s not my intent to horde the data but I also desire not to be a royal pain in the ass to the very kind people who have data access and are sharing it! I think doing so would be the quickest path to the data being less available for everyone.

You’re on your own.

I hate the image captures and can’t easily find what I’m looking for via browser search. Can you fix this?

TL;DR: not if I continue to use Substack.

I shut down the WordPress web site I’d been running since 2014 over the summer of 2023. I hadn’t been receiving (or posting) data to it since sometime in 2017 and was only keeping that server alive as a place for my old podcast episodes to live, and that was costing me $300 a year. Substack allowed me to migrate the podcast feed and files to Substack for free!

Free cloud hosting might be bad business, BUT it’s very consumer friendly.

In some kind of O. Henry-esque twist, like a month after I shut the site down, I started receiving the data directly again. Sadly, Substack doesn’t have any capacity for natively formatting tabular data. The image captures are far from perfect, but it’s easy and it’s free, for you and for me.

Why don’t you post everything/more data and not just sports?

The image capturing process mentioned above has its limits, but even without that, I’d be sticking just to sports.

I’ve always viewed what I’m doing as a utility for the DIY (do it yourself) crowd. There are other sites that provide more data (outside of sports) and even within sports-only Jon Lewis at SportsMediaWatch, Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal and Anthony Crupi at Sportico do a great job of providing more context about the ratings, if that’s what you’re after.

Why do you rank/sort by adults 18-49 instead of total viewers?

No reason other than figuring that most people looking at the data were refugees from ShowBuzzDaily which had used that format for over a decade.