A highlights package from the 2023 US Open Swimming Championships that aired a week after the meet’s conclusion, on Saturday, December 9th, drew an average audience of 690,000 viewers. The special was aired at 5PM Eastern Time on NBC.
That is a marked increase from other recent highlight shows, including USA Swimming’s 2022 National Championships that drew 572,000 followers on a Sunday at noon also on NBC, and an April 2022 Pro Swim Series highlight package that drew 537,000 viewers also on a Sunday afternoon.
That was the second re-airing of the package, which also ran on Sunday, December 3 on CNBCS at Noon and drew just 61,000 viewers.
These packaged versions of major swim meets have had mixed success. While domestic meets always seem to draw interest, a World Championships highlight package in Summer 2022 drew fewer than 200,000 average viewers in a similar time slot on NBC.
With the Olympics now just 221 days away, NBC will ramp up their coverage of Olympic sports like swimming, and the public’s interest in those events is expected to increase as well. The 5:00 Saturday time slot managed to avoid a head-to-head with the NFL, and aired before the NBA In-Season Tournament finale that began at 8:30PM Eastern and wound up being a ratings juggernaut.
According to the TSX Report, an International Skating Union Grand Prix Final from Beijing, China that aired on NBC at 4:00 PM Eastern Time on Sunday drew 648,000 viewers against NFL games.
All of this comes as Olympic sports look for new television homes in the United States following the shut down The Olympic Channel in the US in September 2022. That came after another frequent home for swimming, NBC Sports, closed at the end of 2021. Fewer spaces to air events like swimming means more competition for airtime against other sporting events.
Nice x 1000
USA Swimming still running their tv like it’s 1995…
I’m gonna call BS on the 700K of viewers. How do we know people were watching and not just leaving the TV on and going grocery shopping. There was a national pickleball tourney at my club this weekend and it was on Youtube live and I watched a little bit of it in person when I was at the club playing and then I went home and logged into youtube to watch the final and there was a whopping 20 people watching and I thought it was actually a pretty good broadcast.
Thanks for all this data. I wonder how many people watched the event on NBC Peacock live or after the event finished.
Streaming USA Swimming meets on a PC after the event appears to be changing. USA Swimming has created a venture with Connected Television Group (https://ctv.group/) called the USA Swimming Network, which requires equipment, such as a Roku box, to watch events.
It appears that the entire 2023 U.S. Open Championships are not available for viewing on the USA Swimming YouTube site. All earlier elite national events are still on the site.
Ssshh. Don’t tell Hinchey. Olympic Trials ticket prices were just starting to (predicably) drop to reasonable levels, due to a lack of fans being willing to take out a home equity line of credit to purchase all-session passes. This news might result in price hikes back up to the stratosphere again!
Do you know what was on directly before it?
You wouldn’t believe how hard this info is to find.
It was the Grant Thornton Invitational, which is a cool matchplay format that pairs one PGA Tour Player and one LPGA Tour Player together. I haven’t found any ratings for it, but it was a new event that had great spectator turnout, so if television ratings followed, that could explain the bump in viewership for swimming.
That was my theory given the actual World Championships only got a third of those viewers
Was there any sort of marketing for this, or did those 600,000 viewers just stumble upon the meet highlights?
I probably would’ve turned it on had I known it was airing.
Nobody told me about it.
Imagine if they reached out to SwimSwam to promote the event on TV instead of treating SwimSwam like an enemy…I’m highly confident that in one week,SwimSwam.com gets more unique visitors and and page views than USA Swimming’s does in one month.
I don’t get why USA Swimming doesn’t like your site and business Braden.
He is asking the hard questions and discovering that the emperor may have no clothes, so there’s that.
They never have.
I rocked the culture too much when I came into this by just treating swimming like every other sport. Everyone had a nice gig, cruise control, make their paychecks without working too hard.
Over 11 years they’ve oscillated between “flat out ignoring me” and “literally calling me names like they’re children.” They did have one media relations person who briefly tried to work with us, not against us. It started because, again with their long time financial relationships with Swimming World, Swimming World was threatened by us, and their former leadership was aggressive and defamatory in their efforts to push back against us.
USA Swimming, in fact, actively works against us – and have for years. The… Read more »
Wow. Love the transparency of this comment, which is something USA Swimming has always lacked. We, as a sport, deserve better.
Thank you for the transparency and honesty here- it is mind-boggling how stuck in their old ways USA Swimming is. It is sad and pathetic….and they wonder why their numbers are down between members and sponsors.
I have a cousin who does media for USA Volleyball and when I had mentioned SwimSwam in the past he seemed envious of what you get to do vs. the restrictions of the sporting governance on what they can write about. I do get their (USA Swimming) side as they work directly with the athletes and are always working to positively promote them (and not saying they do the best job). While I don’t think SwimSwam ever goes after an athlete personally about their performance, the comments often go in that direction (I’m probably guilty). I’m not saying that is bad….but just a difference in what each is attempting to accomplish. Thank you for SwimSwam.