What does it mean when almost ten million people change channels in the middle of the most-hyped event in television? Especially one in which advertisers usually can rely on eyeballs sticking around for their expensive and innovative ad spots?
That question may come up in the next discussion about ad rates between the NFL and Madison Avenue. The New York Times reports on the Nielsen ratings for the Super Bowl on Sunday night, which came up a little short of breaking the record set last year for combined viewership on all platforms, but still ranks second all-time, The issue relates to a sudden drop in viewers for its controversial halftime show, featuring Bad Bunny and promoted as a slap back against the immigration enforcement policies of the Trump administration:
In a slight dip from last year’s record-breaking audience numbers, Super Bowl LX generated an average of 124.9 million viewers across NBC’s platforms where it was broadcast or streamed. That is down 2.8 million from last year, which set the mark for most-watched Super Bowl ever. It still ranks Sunday’s game as the second-most-watched show in U.S. history.
In the second quarter, the game reached 137.8 million viewers, the highest peak viewership in U.S. television history.
Bad Bunny’s halftime show reached 128.2 million people, down 5.3 million viewers from Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show last year, the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show ever.
Let’s do the math. Just before the halftime show, the game had 137.8 million active viewers. In the next quarter hour, the show had 128.2 million viewers still tuned in. That’s a drop of 9.6 million people who physically tuned out – not just walked away from the tube to focus on snacks, socializing, or getting a quick nap while the break lasted. Nearly ten million people physically tuned out the NFL’s show. One year earlier, viewers joined for the halftime show.
Where did the viewers go? Us Magazine reported Monday on the impressive viewership for the alternative halftime show. Turning Point USA drew nearly 20 million people to its All American Halfime Show despite not having a broadcast platform at all:
The Turning Point USA All-American Halftime Show likely paled in comparison to Bad Bunny’s star-studded 2026 Super Bowl performance on Sunday, February 8 — but millions of people still tuned in to the alternate option.
According to the YouTube views on Monday, February 9, the organization’s alternate halftime show has since brought in 19 million viewers total. At one point on Sunday night, the livestream reportedly had upwards of six million total viewers.
The Turning Point USA All-American Halftime Show was also broadcast on Rumble, along with Daily Wire+, Real America’s Voice, TBN, CHARGE!, The National News Desk, NTD.com and OAN News. However, details about their streaming numbers have yet to be revealed. The Charlie Kirk Show producer Blake Neff provided estimated numbers on social media.
“TPUSA All-American Halftime Show,” Neff shared via X on Sunday. “Over 5 million simultaneous on TPUSA YT [YouTube]. Almost 1 million on Charlie Kirk’s YT. 200k on Magno News YT. 220k on TPUSA Rumble. 15k CK Rumble.”
The NYT offers respect for the effort:
A third powerful force at play was widespread attention around the halftime act, which drew a competing event through Turning Point USA, a Kid Rock-led concert that at one point registered 6 million concurrent viewers on YouTube, although that number has not been certified by an industry-standard measurement system.
As of Tuesday, the Bad Bunny halftime show video on the NFL’s YouTube channel had more than 57 million views, while the archived video of Turning Point’s halftime show on its YouTube channel had 21 million views.
Note well, though, that the latter number only counts one of the TPUSA archives. The show has another 4.2 million views on Charlie Kirk’s YouTube channel at this point, over 200,000 on Kirk’s Rumble channel, and an additional 2.3 million on TPUSA’s Rumble channel. That adds up to an impressive 27.7 million views, just shy of half that of the NFL’s official halftime show. Given that this is the first real counterprogramming that the NFL and its partners have faced for its halftime shows, it portends some real challenges for them to keep advertisers paying premiums in the slots adjacent to and within the halftime period.
That in itself doesn’t make the Bad Bunny show horrible or a mistake. As I wrote on Monday, having a primarily Spanish-language halftime show on one occasion makes some sense if the league wants to compete with futbol in Latin America (a strategy Jim Geraghty first pointed out), but that wouldn’t explain the sound of ten million hands punching the clicker at just the moment it started. TPUSA put together the competing show after Bad Bunny used his selection to lecture Americans on immigration enforcement and made the language issue into a rebuke. They took a page from the NFL’s previous marketing strategy of leaning into American patriotism to stage a competing musical extravaganza and invited Americans to change the channel. And a lot of them did.
With the strong showing, TPUSA will no doubt put even more resources into the next Super Bowl halftime alternative, and viewers will see it as an even more credible alternative. Will that be enough to get the league to reconsider its choices of acts and messaging, or will they choose to continue their Bud Light/Gillette strategy of lecturing its fans about their wrongthink and have advertisers consider investing elsewhere in that interregnum? Given Roger Goodell’s instincts over the last decade, I’d bet on the latter, and in seeing the NFL turn the TPUSA event into a new tradition at their expense.
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