Super Bowl LVIII Takes Ratings Crown From Last Year’s Game As Most-Watched Ever

The Kansas City Chiefs are now back-to-back Super Bowl Champions. Along with collecting another ring, they’ve also once again set the record for the most-watched Super Bowl of all time.

Super Bowl LVIII raked in an audience of 123.4M viewers on CBS, Nickelodeon, Univision, and digital platforms including NFL+. That’s up 7% from last year’s record-breaking audience of 115.1M on Fox, according to Nielsen data.

CBS led the way with 120M watching on the broadcast network alone, marking the largest audience in history for a single network. According to Nielsen, more than 200M viewers tuned in for at least part of the game across networks. That’s up 10% from last year’s figure of 184M.

Earlier this week, Deadline predicted this year’s Super Bowl could set a record, given the perfect storm that was brewing with Taylor Swift at the center of it all.

The NFL had already posted gains across the board during the regular season, and the postseason performed even better. In January, the Chiefs defeated the Baltimore Ravens in the most-watched AFC Championship of all time. Given everything the Chiefs had on the line in terms of securing their third Super Bowl win in five years, this was sure to be a highly anticipated game, no matter the outcome.

And, of course, Swift managed to fly halfway around the world to support Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce on his big day. The CBS broadcast was fairly conservative when it came to showing the pop star and her friends on screen during the game, but as proven by the many events she’s attended that have gone on to set audience records in the past year, her influence couldn’t be discredited.