There’s Another NASCAR Tradition That Needs To Go Away

There are many traditions in NASCAR. From starting the season with their “Super Bowl” to Polish victory laps, grandfather clocks, and pre-race prayers, there are many long-standing traditions that seem as old as the sport itself.

There have also been traditions that have gone away. From Confederate flags, to racing as soon as church lets out on Sunday, to the way points are awarded, and the tracks they race at, some things are now nothing more than distant memories.

NASCAR has abandoned some of these traditions to change with the times; become more relevant, appeal to new demographics, and attract new fans.

However, some old traditions remain, and some of those need to be abandoned.

Since the beginning of NASCAR’s modern era, historically defined as starting in 1972, television ratings have been the barometer of the sport’s overall health. It started in 1979 when CBS aired the season opening Daytona 500 won by Richard Petty and which featured a fight between the Allison’s and Cale Yarborough. A snowstorm along the east coast kept many viewers inside with little to do beyond watching the first 500-mile race broadcast live from start to finish. Many credit that race with starting NASCAR’s rise in popularity.

That race had a 10.5 Nielsen
NLSN
rating with 16 million viewers and set the benchmark for years to come. That Daytona 500 rating would hold until 2002 when Ward Burton won, and NBC had a rating of 10.9. They would peak in 2006 when Jimmie Johnson won his first Daytona 500 and NBC got a rating of 11.3.

Since then, NASCAR has seen an overall TV viewership decline. As a comparison this year’s Daytona 500 won by Ricky Stenhouse Jr. delivered a 4.4 rating for Fox.

If you based the overall health of the sport based on TV ratings, you might think NASCAR is in its dying days.

You’d be wrong.

In the past, TV ratings have been important for NASCAR, and other professional sports. They’ve acted as the measure of success, important for networks to set the advertising rates and influence sponsorship for the sanctioning body and teams. But like it has for all professional sports and the entire entrainment industry, NASCAR has seen TV ratings drop as viewers migrate to streaming platforms along with other online viewing platforms. With this diversification TV ratings have lost their role as the lone determining factor of success.

While the landscape has not fully transitioned yet and ratings still do account for some of how the revenue is factored, for streaming platforms such as Hulu, Paramount, Disney +, Netflix
NFLX
, and Amazon
AMZN
, revenue is generated and led by subscribers, not by advertisers.

Network TV has started to change with the times. As recently as 2017, networks such as CBS and NBC reported that less than half their overall revenue comes from traditional advertisers. And in 2016, spending on TV ads fell behind digital platforms for the first time in history as viewers continue to pivot away from linear TV towards streaming.

And just this year Nielsen reported that streaming accounted for 38.7% of total TV usage in the month of July, while linear TV viewership fell below 50% for the first time.

So, as the ratings fall so does the spending on TV ads, and it is now just one part of the overall revenue model for a network. And the smaller TV ad spending becomes the less important the ratings will be.

NASCAR is not alone in seeing declines in ratings. All major sports have seen ratings decline. All except the NFL which has the advantage of having its games broadcast on more than one network in a given weekend.

NASCAR’s season ended at Phoenix Raceway on November 5. The sport reported that the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season averaged 2.86 million viewers across FOX, FS1, NBC and USA Network, down 5% from last year (3.03M) and the least-watched season on record.

Looking at that statement alone might cause some to say that the sport of NASCAR will soon be no more. In fact, as has seemingly become a tradition, some critics were quick to jump on their soapboxes and shout just that. However, when put into the context of today’s cord-cutting TV landscape, the final averages for both this season and last are still more than the average regular season MLB, NHL, and NBA game bring in.

And perhaps more importantly for NASCAR, it is still well ahead of Formula One and IndyCar when it comes to viewership in the US. That series averaged 1.24 million viewers per race across ESPN, ESPN 2, and ABC for the 2023 season’s opening 12 races. For IndyCar that number was 1.403 million viewers.

NASCAR hasn’t simply watched the TV landscape change without reacting. Like other sports, NASCAR has been developing strategies to engage with fans away from traditional TV broadcasts through diverse channels, including social media, streaming services, and digital platforms. For example, this season NASCAR offered free livestreams from inside every car in every NASCAR Cup Series race as a standard feature in NASCAR Drive – NASCAR’s digital race day hub.

The sport signed its first combined media rights deal in 1999 to have its races broadcast on network TV. That tradition carries on to today. However, as the next rights deal is being finalized and should be announced soon, traditional TV broadcasts on a network or cable outlet will most likely share space with non-linear platforms such as streaming. And that makes sense as the way viewers consume their entertainment, news, and sports has changed.

MORE FROM FORBESNASCAR’s Digital Team Ready To Meet The Changing Media LandscapeBy Greg Engle

In some peoples, and NASCAR fan’s, worlds TV ratings are the only way to gauge how successful the overall sport is. Not track attendance, close finishes, new champions, or exciting racing on the track. None of that matters to some. Instead, low TV ratings mean that everything else means nothing. And that is of course wrong. NASCAR’s 2023 season, its 75^th, didn’t have a Richard Petty Daytona 500 winning moment, nor did they see the Allison’s and Cale Yarborough throwing fists. It wasn’t the best season, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. It was filled with plenty of highlights: There was the first ever street race in the Modern Era with a first-time, foreign-born winner, and popular champions were crowned across all three top series. There is still a bit of work to do when it comes to some things such as the short track package, and not every race was a sellout, though many were. But to gauge an entire season on low TV ratings should be a thing of the past.

While many traditions remain, and change, the reliance on TV ratings as a measure of the success of NASCAR, and the use by critics to show that the sport is somehow in decline, is a tradition that needs to go the way of starting races after church on Sunday, or even the Confederate flag. None of those matter anymore, and neither should TV ratings.