Our rising national obsession with sports

We’re approaching Super Bowl weekend, and while some people joke the day of the big game has become a national holiday, it’s actually not too far from the truth.

More people engage with the Super Bowl than almost anything else in our fragmented culture.

You may not be able to talk to your co-workers about politics or understand everything they say about technology, but it’s still safe to discuss who’s going to win the big game, even if you’re not an NFL fan.

That universality reflects our growing national obsession with sports.

A new report from Nielsen details just how central sports have become to Americans’ media habits.

Of the top 100 live TV programs on television last year, 93 percent were sporting events. That’s up from 14 percent in 2005, astonishing growth.

Further, Nielsen found that sports accounts for half of all conversations related to TV on Twitter last year, though they made up just 1.4 percent of all content on television.

And smartphone users spent 1.2 million hours on sports-related sites, up 22 percent from the previous year.

New media has clearly had a big role in the rise of sports.

Viewership of live TV overall has fallen the past 10 years. Nielsen notes that only 66 percent of viewing for dramas now takes place live.

But 95 percent of sports viewership occurs live. That’s an important distinction for advertisers, who often have time-sensitive messages. If, for instance, a sale is taking place the day after a program airs, it’s worthless for the ad about that sale to be seen a week later through timeshifting.

Because of sports’ time-sensitive nature, they’ve gotten more important to advertisers as they simultaneously become more popular.

The report notes that there have been viewership milestones for a number of sports in the past year.

Last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched ever, with 114.4 million viewers.

The NBA finals on ABC were the most-watched since the Michael Jordan era ended in 1998, averaging 19.9 million.

Three of the four most-watched hockey games in the past 40 years have taken place in the past five years.

And the U.S. soccer team’s victory in the Women’s World Cup drew 23.6 million total viewers, the most ever for an American soccer game.

Tags: nielsen, nielsen sports, sports television, sports tv, sports viewing, super bowl