Nearly Half of World Cup Viewers Choose Telemundo Over Fox

Q: As viewership surges, how will Fox's ad strategy change for the World Cup's crucial final matches?

Fox is likely to make the final matches even more lucrative for advertisers while trying to reduce the viewer backlash that hurt it earlier in the tournament. The clearest shift is pricing. With World Cup audiences sharply higher and the final expected to draw one of the biggest TV audiences of the year, Fox can charge premium rates for remaining inventory. Earlier reporting put a 30-second spot around $200,000 for standard matches and as high as $750,000 for U.S. games; the semifinals and final should sit at the very top of that range, if not above it, because live sports scarcity gives Fox unusual leverage. At the same time, Fox has already shown it may need to soften how those ads appear. Its early use of full-screen commercials during FIFA’s new hydration breaks drew criticism and even led to missed live action in one match. Fox later moved at times to a split-screen format that kept some stadium pictures on screen while ads ran. For the final rounds, that hybrid approach is the most likely path: preserve the new ad inventory, but present it in a less disruptive way to keep viewers from defecting to Telemundo. So the strategy is not likely to mean fewer ads. It is more likely to mean more expensive ads, sold against record audiences, with greater pressure on Fox to package them in split-screen or other less interruptive formats during in-game breaks.

3 articles · Updated · NPR · Jul 2

Nearly half of World Cup viewers are opting for Telemundo instead of Fox, a notable split in U.S. broadcast preferences for the tournament.
Telemundo is drawing fans with exuberant announcers whose energy better matches the matches, even for viewers who do not understand every word.
Its coverage also keeps cameras on the field during hydration breaks rather than cutting away to commercials, giving viewers a more continuous game experience.