As the 2018 NFL season is set to kick off on Thursday evening with the Philadelphia Eagles taking on the Atlanta Falcons, there are some intriguing studies being released to show just how much the average fan will be watching this year. Specifically, fans will spend much more time watching commercials during the course of games than they may think.
According to a new report from the Streaming Observer , fans will spend a full day’s worth of time watching commercials during the 2018 NFL season. That’s right, average fans will be spending around 24 hours simply watching commercials during football games.
“The average NFL fan will watch a full day’s worth of commercials during the 17-week regular season — that’s right, 24 hours of commercials (most of which will be the same few commercials over and over and over again).”
Every NFL fan that watches a good chunk of games each season knows the drill. During timeouts, after scores, punts, and more, the game will take a break for commercials. Those commercial breaks can last for short periods of time or much longer, which all adds up to the grand total listed above.
Furthermore, the average NFL fan spends about 4.2 hours per week watching games. For those fans who play fantasy football, the average time spent watching games each week is around 8.7 hours. Needless to say, those 8.7 hours for fantasy football players are not comfortable times.
Check out this math that was released in the same article that was linked to above.
“The average NFL fan watches 252 minutes of games every week during the regular season.
“Multiply 252 by 0.3298 (the percentage of commercial time in the average game), and that comes out to 83.1 minutes of commercials the average fan watches each week during their NFL viewing window.
“If you multiply 83.1 minutes by 17 (the number of weeks in NFL’s regular season), you’ll see the typical NFL fan watches 1,412.86 minutes of commercials over the course of the season. That’s 23.5 hours of commercials. Rounded up, that’s 24 hours — an entire day’s worth of commercials fans will watch during the games this season.”
To say that the math is impressive and concerning all at the same time would be an understatement. Fans who are reading this can now understand just how much time they are using up when they watch football on the weekends, even when they aren’t actually watching their team play.
More than likely this study won’t change much of anything from a viewers’ perspective. That being said, it could become yet another argument tactic for women hoping to get their men off the couch on Sunday afternoons.