Remember when the Super Bowl was the cornerstone cultural moment?
Here is Fortnite monthly revenue vs Super Bowl LIII ad revenue.
The Super Bowl manages to hang on in importance, despite being part of the old culture. The event had 98.2 million viewers (the lowest in a decade). Ninja’s streaming events can’t beat that, yet.
Tellingly, the top social media moment of the Super Bowl was at the end of the half time show with 171,000 Twitter interactions, according to Nielsen. Those were almost certainly from GenZ outraged that Maroon 5 didn’t play SpongeBob Sweet Victory. That certainly tells the story about how the younger generation feels about the Super Bowl.
The official NFL upload of the half-time show got hit with a downvote brigade (as popularized by the backlash against the 2018 YouTube rewind). As of this writing, it has 602,000 downvotes to 81,000 upvotes.
I’d suggest that people under 30 would rather watch Fortnite and post SpongeBob memes than watch the Super Bowl. This problem will only grow for the NFL. With the Fortnite World Cup happening later this year, can eSports hit the 100 million viewer mark, and dethrone the Super Bowl?
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