A record breaking audience tuned in to watch Usher and Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl

They also watched the Chiefs beat the 49ers, making Super Bowl LVIII the most viewed television broadcast of all time

By Emma Keates | February 13, 2024 | 3:12pm

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A record breaking audience tuned in to watch Usher and Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl

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Chiefs players after winning Super Bowl LVIII Photo: Ezra Shaw

It’s hard not to sound like the numbers guy from The Rehearsal when perfect numbers just keep popping up in regard to Taylor Swift and her many spheres of influence. While Super Bowl viewership statistics weren’t 13 or 1989-related (that would have lent a little too much credence to the insane “Biden rigged the game” theory), they were clean in the way we just know is leaving the Swifties content.

According to Variety, 123.4 million people tuned in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime on Sunday, the highest number of people watching the same broadcast in television history. While 112 million of those viewers came from CBS—the largest recorded audience ever for a single network—don’t discount SpongeBob and his friends from Bikini Bottom just yet. While exact viewership data is not yet available, the remaining 12.4 million viewers came from Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Univision, CBS Sports, and various other NFL streaming platforms including NFL+.

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Logically, this also makes Super Bowl LVIII the most streamed game of all time, beating out last year’s Chiefs victory over the Philadelphia Eagles by 8.3 million viewers. Whether this jump is directly attributable to the Taylor Swift effect or people were just really hyped about the new Wicked trailer is unclear. (A poll conducted by research firm Numerator did find that 20% of surveyed viewers were rooting for the Chiefs because of Swift’s endorsement.) What is clear is that despite a lot of public hand-wringing, big TV events still do have the power to bring our divided country together. The Grammys and the Golden Globes both saw massive increases in viewership from last year, and now there’s this piece of data to add to the collection. Viva Las Vegas, indeed.