15.2 million online users sample NFL game on Yahoo

If Sunday morning’s NFL contest between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Buffalo Bills had been on TV, it would not have been considered a ratings hit.

But it wasn’t on TV nationally. It was streamed online over Yahoo for free and seen as a test case for potential of delivering NFL games over the Internet. Both the league and Yahoo said they were pleased with the results.

Yahoo announced Monday that the game from Wembley Stadium in London reached over 33.6 million views across all Internet streaming devices around the world. The company said over 15.2 million unique users watched a portion of the game.

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While that figure is impressive in the online world, the average audience number, which is what advertisers would look at for a traditional TV telecast, was more modest.

Yahoo said viewers streamed a total 460 million minutes of the game. The game was 195 minutes long, which means an average of 2.36 million viewers were watching.

In the 2014 season, a Fox telecast of Detroit Lions-Atlanta Falcons contest from London, which had a 9:30 a.m. ET start as did Sunday’s game, averaged a 6.6 rating, which represents about 7.6 million households.

An NFL spokesperson said a true average viewership number of the telecast will not be available until audience data is added from the local TV broadcasts in Buffalo, Jackson and the United Kingdom. The NFL is also waiting on streaming data from China.

Buffalo and Jacksonville were the only two U.S. markets to carry the game on television. The Jaguars defeated the Bills, 34-31.

“We’re thrilled with the results of our initial step distributing an NFL game to a worldwide audience and with the work of our partner, Yahoo,” Hans Schroeder, senior vice president, media strategy, business development and sales for the NFL, said in a statement. “We are incredibly excited by the fact that we took a game that would have been viewed by a relatively limited television audience in the United States and by distributing it digitally were able to attract a global audience of over 15 million viewers.”

Yahoo said 33% of streams were from international users, across 185 countries worldwide. Thirty advertisers bought commercial time in the streamed game.