Quote
CART Television Viewership Continues to Plummet
In our Cleveland race report, we noted that CART had obtained an 'overnight' rating for the ABC telecast of 1.6, its highest of the year. That would have translated to around 1.5 million viewers. Unfortunately, when the final rating was announced, the number was substantially different, and the change was not to CART's benefit.
In fact, the final rating for Cleveland came in at a lowly 1.0, representing just 985,000 homes. That tally represented a loss of 354,000 viewers from 1999, and came despite the fact that CART moved the race from cable to network.
Cleveland thus became the eighth of nine races this year to have lost viewers in comparison to 1999. Discounting Nazareth, which was snow- delayed to the day before the Indianapolis 500, the smallest loss of viewers has been 254,000. That was for the Homestead opener, which produced CART's largest audience to date, 1,326,000, and is the only event to have exceeded CART's season average for 1999, which was 1,131,250.
Of this year's nine events, only the Motegi broadcast has shown an increase in viewership. The 1999 telecast was on cable, and aired at Midnight on the East Coast. This year, CART moved the race to the ABC network, which also tape-delayed it, but to a more viewer– friendly time slot on Sunday afternoon. As a result, where the 1999 broadcast was seen in a paltry 291,000 homes, Motegi drew 1.085 million this year, an increase of 794,000 households. That has helped CART's average, but of the nine races, four had viewership losses which essentially equaled or exceeded the gain for Motegi.
For the nine races, the loss in households totals a staggering four million, dropping from 1.1 million in '99 to 681,333. On average, CART has been losing 440,000 viewers per race. If the pattern continues, CART will end the year with its 20 races having lost nine million of the 22.6 million viewers it attracted with the same number of events in 1999, and will have lost 45 percent of the 30 million viewers the series attracted to just 16 races in its peak year, 1995.
In detail, here are the numbers for all nine races to date:Race 1999 2000 Change Homestead 1,580,000 N 1,326,000 C -254,000 Long Beach 1,501,000 N 547,000 C -954,000 Rio 1,260,000 N 518,000 C -742,000 Motegi 291,000 C 1,085,000 N 794,000 Nazareth 524,000 C 467,000 C -57,000 Milwaukee 1,230,000 N 233,000 C -997,000 Detroit 1,299,000 N 538,000 N -761,000 Portland 1,080,000 N 433,000 C -647,000 Cleveland 1,339,000 C 985,000 N -354,000 Total 10,104,000 6,132,000 -3,972,000 Percent change -39.3% No. of Races 9 9 Network/Cable 6N - 3C 3N - 6C Percent on Network 66.7% 33.3% Viewers Per Race 1,122,666 681,333 -441,333 Percentage change -39.3% Total Network Viewers 7,950,000 2,608,000 Network Average 1,325,000 869,333 -455,667 Total Cable Viewers 2,154,000 3,524,000 Cable Average 718,000 587,333 -130,667 C = cable; N = Network Note: Milwaukee was rain-delayed from Sunday (ABC) to Monday (ESPN2)
It's just as well that CART is going to Europe, because it seems it badly needs audience. I also heard that one of the first things Nunn did when he entered office was to offer Eurosport free rights to air CART races.
So why is it that CART is failing to attract audience?
