Amazon touts viewer, subscription success in 'Thursday Night Football'
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Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is keeping some key numbers from its first exclusive Thursday Night Football stream close to the vest, but it's painting a picture of success, saying it beat "all" audience expectations.
"Our measurement shows that the audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership," Amazon executive Jay Marine said in an internal email reported by Sports Business Journal.
That comes ahead of a Nielsen report on the stream coming Tuesday or likely even later in the week.
The email suggests the stream outperformed the company's promised advertiser guarantee of 12.5M viewers, and it marked "the most watched night of primetime in the U.S. in the history of Prime Video."
And that would come in well above expectations for single-digit millions of viewers. A Thursday night game last year between the same opponents (The Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs) drew 17.9M viewers across Fox and the NFL Network, SBJ noted.
The broadcast also resulted in a record number of sign-ups to Amazon's Prime subscription for a three-hour period. That span beat historical high marks from Amazon's Prime Day events, Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
On the advertising front, the makeup was heavy on internal Amazon promotion, with multiple ads for Prime Video as well as ads for Amazon Web Services and hardware (Amazon's Ring security) - suggesting there's more room for cautious advertisers to get on board.
Non-Amazon advertisers tended to focus on insurance (Progressive, State Farm, Geico and Aflac) and gambling: DraftKings (DKNG) out-advertised FanDuel (OTCPK:PDYPY) (OTCPK:PDYPF) on the stream. Some other traditional football ad verticals were more reticent for now, including alcohol (ads missing in action) and automotive (light).