F1 News
Number of viewers of F1 slightly reduced after 2021 peak season
- Ludo van Denderen
It had become a tradition: at the beginning of a season, Formula 1 announced how many viewers the class had the previous year. Each time, this was done with a blaring press release. Indeed, time after time, F1 managed to report that there were once again more TV viewers. But even into August of 2023, there was silence from its London headquarters. Why has F1 not revealed (yet) how many TV viewers there were in 2022, and in which regions they were to be found?
Leading Business F1 Magazine knows why Ian Holmes, the TV guru within the Formula 1 Group, has not gone public with the figures: there is, in fact, a decline in viewership in 2022, albeit a marginal one. We need only dip into the annual figures to see that. Whereas in 2021 - the year of the exciting title fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton - there were 1.55 billion viewers, according to the annual report, there were 1.54 billion in 2022. The annual press releases always explained how the number of viewers was divided by region and which age groups they fell into. Nothing is currently known about that.
Supremacy of Red Bull Racing
The 1.54 billion number sounds like a lot, but it doesn't tell the whole story either. Here's the thing: Formula 1 calculates viewing figures according to a cumulative principle. If there are four broadcasts with fifty million viewers each, Formula 1 considers this to be two hundred million viewers. No breakdown is made by unique viewers. So exactly how many people worldwide saw at least one Grand Prix in 2022 cannot be said. So the total number of people from all broadcasts collectively decreased slightly.
Analysts expect a further decline in viewership over 2023. The reason given is the supremacy of Red Bull Racing, which has won all Grands Prix. The expectation is that it will soon turn out that a part of the audience is dropping out because Max Verstappen is now winning every race. "Everyone accepts that Red Bull's dominance is causing a dent in the ratings. But it's a dent and nothing to be ashamed of," Business F1 Magazine quoted an anonymous former F1 team manager as saying.
Interest in America declined slightly
Interest from American viewers - a key target group for Formula 1 - declined slightly in 2023. To give an idea, the number of viewers to the opening race of the season, the Bahrain Grand Prix, was 1.318 million in the United States. A year earlier, 1.353 million people watched the first Grand Prix in the US. NASCAR is still more popular than Formula 1. On the same day in March, 3.991 million people watched a NASCAR race and IndyCar attracted 1.189 million viewers this Sunday.
Despite the slight decline in viewers, there is also good news, as the number of spectators at Grands Prix continues to increase around the world, the number of people interested on social media is growing and the Netflix series Drive to Survive is immensely popular. Incidentally, Liberty Media - the owner of Formula 1 - did announce last week that it recorded lower revenues in the second quarter of 2023 compared to the same period a year earlier. This was mainly due to the late cancellation of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, which was removed from the calendar at the last minute due to severe weather and flooding.