Why the low Indy 500 TV ratings were surprising and why the blackout isn't solely to blame

The phrase you heard all month around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix unofficially kicking off the biggest month of the American motorsports calendar, was that “rising tides lift all ships.” It’s a favorite line around Penske Entertainment Corp. officials and even seeped into the NBC broadcast booth’s lexicon from time to time.

But there’s no way around it, no easy way to explain it and no one or two things to blame it on. The Indianapolis 500’s TV rating – for a race that included intrigue around Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean’s debuts and Helio Castroneves’ ‘Drive for 5’ – flat out sunk. After a promising average of 5.581 million viewers watched a year ago as Castroneves hunted down Alex Palou and joined "The Club’, NBC drew just 4.8 million across its various platforms that include linear TV, Peacock Premium and additional streaming through NBCSports.com.

Looking past the 2020 race that shifted dates due to the pandemic, it’s the worst TV rating for the 500 in the race’s live broadcast history.

It represents a 14% drop in the total average audience in a race with seemingly so much more intrigue coming in than 2021, a puzzling result after IndyCar and NBC inked a new exclusive broadcast partnership deal last summer. The campaign was formally kicked off with a popular, highly-produced, creative commercial campaign to a primetime audience during the Winter Olympics in February. Castroneves visited the ‘Today Show’ on his birthday May 10, following NBC’s spot with Johnson during the Kentucky Derby the weekend prior, to begin to drum up mainstream audience awareness. NBC pitched in again two weeks later by placing Johnson on Jimmy Fallon’s ‘The Tonight Show’ during race week to drum up additional attention.

Neither seemed to make make much impact – or at least, you’d hope it didn’t. If it did, imagine what the rating might have been without them.

Before we get deeper, it’s important to note that, according to a Penske Entertainment Corp. official, the overall PUT Level (or People Using Televisions metric, meaning how many people across the country were tuned into something Sunday afternoon) was down 18% compared to a year ago. In short, it means the 500’s drop in average viewership somewhat mirrored the overall drop in TV viewership for the Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend in 2022 versus 2021.

Indy 500 TV ratings history:

• 2021:The best since 2016
• 2020:A pandemic-ravaged rating
• 2019:A lift from a new NBC partnership
• 2018:Then the least-watched 500 ever
• 2017: A sizable drop with the blackout back
• 2016:Hits 6 million with the blackout lifted

It’s not something to overlook, but just as PEC officials tout the 500’s nature as a special, once-annual, can’t-miss-it event to prop up their decision to blackout live local viewers on linear TV, you would hope that a spectacle such as the 500 wouldn’t be affected too harshly by the ebb and flow of TV viewers that day or whether it was a perfect day to spend outside instead of on the couch compared to a year ago.

Keep in mind: this year’s race was the second-highest attended 500 in a quarter century, hosting more than 325,000 people, a crowd that left only a few thousand grandstand seats unsold. The front stretch was sold-out, track president Doug Boles said before the race. And though the crowd at the Snake Pit was down a few thousand compared to recent years and the infield at-large wasn’t bursting at the seams, you could feel the heightened energy, anticipation and excitement spending a few minutes walking the grounds on race day morning.

It even led to a qualifying weekend crowd that matched the 100th running in 2016 (50,000 over two days, including 30,000 on a Sunday, compared to 25,000 a year ago when there was far more action), and a Sunday network TV audience for qualifying of 915,000 versus 649,000 a year ago. Together, it’s why today’s ratings number was so surprising.

Last year’s race only really got a boost on Castroneves’ surprise run over the final 30 minutes or so, along with the never-to-be-topped celebration afterwards. In terms of an average audience, you would think names like Grosjean and Johnson, though they didn’t ultimately perform well, would’ve attracted a similar number of viewers drawn for a specific, unique-to-this-year storyline. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.

It’s also important not to forget that the race a year ago could be viewed live on linear TV in central Indiana, consistently the race’s most fiery hotbed, and it delivered with a local rating of 21.3. Given the jump in the average audience of 100,000 in last year’s race (5.581 million) over 2019 (5.489 million), which was the last “normal” 500 broadcast with the blackout in place, it was reasonable to assume at the time that the blackout rules for both years made up most of that gap – all things considered. Factored into those ratings, the 2019 race included a 10.89 rating for central Indiana on the tape-delayed broadcast, versus the 21.3 live one of two years later.

In my mind at the time a year ago, I saw those two as fairly even results. It meant that, with NBC, IndyCar and IMS had put a halt to a fledging TV audience for the 500 that had dropped from 6.5 million in 2015 to 6 million (2016), 5.5 million (2017) and 4.9 million (2018) over the final four years of the ABC deal. Even without a live central Indiana audience (minus Peacock viewers), you would’ve hoped the extra lead-in storylines would’ve made up the gap. NASCAR and F1 fans didn’t have any overlap between their own respective appointment-viewing races that sandwiched the 500 and could tune in to see how Johnson and Grosjean did.

And yet, while NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 rating (3.869 million) on Fox stayed relatively flat compared to the year prior (4.060 million) and the Monaco Grand Prix built a much stronger audience moving from ESPN2 in 2021 (977,000) to ESPN on Sunday (1.6 million), the 500 took a significant dip that can’t solely be attributed to the return of the blackout or that history struck at the checkered flag in 2021.

I’ll be the first to admit I watch very little live TV, whether it be NBC or otherwise, so I can’t say if there was a frustrating lack of promotion to a national audience in the race’s lead-up or how it might have compared to years past. That’s the only other controllable shortcoming I can think of that might have led to something like this – and yet, as I mentioned earlier, NBC was active and forward-thinking in using Johnson and Castroneves on its platforms to get the everyday TV-watcher informed.

The only win from all this was clearly NBC’s streaming success through Peacock. A year ago, NBC noted that 34,500 viewers used NBCSports.com or the NBC Sports app to watch the race live. With the addition of Peacock, the only way folks in Central Indiana could view the race live without being onsite at IMS, that number jumped to 218,800. It represents roughly a 10-times increase on what the digital audience has been for a run-of-the-mill race, likely augmented by new subscriptions around Central Indiana. But if IMS has its way, that workaround for the local audience will also be gone in a year.

It begs the question: how much is it worth it to IMS and PEC to continue this hardline stance on the local blackout? I continue to struggle to believe that a truly significant portion of those who flock to IMS at these historic levels would rather watch from their couch – when Sunday, for example, they missed multiple crashes as they happened live. Whereas the linear TV broadcast at least would typically go to a split-screen on commercials, Peacock would go full-screen with ads altogether, from what I’m told.

The exact reason IMS continues to black out this race – that it’s a can’t miss, one-of-a-kind event that they believe people should have to make an effort to experience – is exactly why I trust few would choose not to come (weather being similar from year-to-year). So much of the onsite fans come either for the party (which you can’t do to the same extent on your couch or your backyard), the spectacle and pageantry (which doesn’t hit the same over the airwaves) or the simple tradition of having done so for years and years. If you lose, say, 10,000-15,000 fans, amounting to $1-2 million in lost revenue, you could raise ticket prices $3-6 dollars across the board and hardly anyone would bat an eye.

If it turns out fewer and fewer people are making even the most special events appointment TV viewing, you need to make the most out of that opportunity to draw a multi-million-person audience. That’s where the money is, whether it be your TV deal with NBC, their ad spots or your sponsorship partners. And to register just a 5.7 local rating in Indianapolis for the tape-delayed broadcast on Sunday when the live one a year ago was 21.3 shows just how much that local impact had. Again, lifting the blackout alone won’t account for losing 900,000 linear TV viewers from 2019 to 2022, but it would be one way to stop the bleeding at a time when you sold 98% of your grandstand seats on Sunday and hit 93% of your overall capacity.

Elsewhere, IndyCar, IMS and NBC need to take a long look in the mirror and figure out how, at a time when they believe motorsports interest overall in the U.S. is on the rise (though most notably with what it claims to be its non-rival F1) why the Greatest Spectacle in Racing simply didn’t resonate with a TV audience across the country on Sunday in a way it has previously, with a race chock-full of unique storylines ripe to draw brand-new viewers.

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.