Twitter’s ratings soar for second ‘Thursday Night Football’ stream

Thursday night marked the second go-round of Twitter’s big NFL-streaming experiment, and viewership appears to be trending in the right direction for the social media platform.

Per Recode, Twitter drew 2.2 million viewers to its stream of the Patriots blowout win over the Texans, slightly more than the 2.1 million who tuned in to Bills-Jets last week in Twitter’s NFL-airing debut.

That slight uptick in total viewers is nothing to tweet-storm about, but in terms of average viewership—which is what typical TV ratings are based on—the second week blew away the first. Twitter averaged about 327,000 viewers in a given minute, a figure 34 percent better than the 243,000 the site drew last week.

We should note that Patriots-Texans is a more compelling matchup than Jets-Bills. The television broadcast of the former was 14 percent higher than the latter, suggesting Twitter benefited somewhat from more general interest in the game.

But you can’t write off a 34 percent week-to-week increase. The improved viewership indicates that more people knew about Twitters stream than last week and that the people who watched last week weren’t turned off from the concept. And because the ratings were higher despite a similar overall audience, we can presume that viewers stuck around for longer this week, another promising sign. More and more people watch television occasionally or primarily on their computers, and clearly NFL fans don’t mind seeing a game on a smaller screen.

This partnership between Twitter and the NFL, which includes 10 games over the course of the season, could foreshadow the future of sports streaming. We’ll keep an eye on the ratings as the season goes on.