In its first year of broadcasting the Indianapolis 500, Fox Sports managed to assemble the biggest television audience for the race in 17 years, as the network’s marketing team helped serve up 2 million more TV viewers than the year-ago event.
According to Nielsen fast nationals, Fox’s coverage of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” averaged 7.05 million viewers, up 40% versus the year-ago 5.02 million on NBC. Toss in the 286,000 streaming impressions for the 2024 race, and Fox’s linear-TV deliveries improved 33%.
Bear in mind that the official TV numbers, which are expected to be released on Wednesday, may adjust sufficiently upward to surpass the 2008 figure, when ABC’s coverage averaged 7.25 million viewers. Per Nielsen, the Disney network notched the biggest Indy 500 broadcast of the century three years earlier, when rookie Danica Patrick’s fourth-place finish averaged 9.74 million viewers.
Open-wheel racing fans were confronted with fewer commercial breaks during Fox’s inaugural Indy, as the network leaned heavily on double-box ads during the green-flag laps, rather than cutting from the action to the usual load of full-screen commercial breaks. Advertisers who bought time in the broadcast got a pretty sweet deal, with the average unit cost landing at around $120,000. That works out to a $17.02 CPM, or two-and-a-half times under the average cost of reaching 1,000 viewers via broadcast primetime programming ($43.35).
The race peaked at 8.4 million viewers in the 4:15 p.m.-4:30 p.m. ET quarter-hour, at around the same time Alex Palou kissed the bricks and took a swig of victory milk. Speaking of cow juice, while Fox took some online flak for planting paid milk-guzzlers in the stands during its Saturday night MLB doubleheader, the stunt certainly didn’t sour any enthusiasm for the race itself.
Fox has been cranking out the Indy hype since its broadcast of Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9, when the network devoted 75 seconds of in-game inventory to promoting Indy. (As it happens, Palou was featured in a 45-second pre-kickoff unit that aired shortly after 6 p.m. ET.) In the weeks leading up to the race, Fox aired hundreds of teasers for Indy across its portfolio of TV networks, which includes the broadcast flagship as well as FS1 and Fox News Channel.
Given the big uptick in viewers, the strategy seems to have paid off handsomely. That said, at least one member of the Fox Sports team got an earful for his cross-promotional efforts, as approximately 350,000 Hoosiers booed Fox NFL analyst Tom Brady during the driver intros. Brady, who took a lap with Jimmie Johnson ahead of Sunday’s race, later took to Instagram to rib the Indy crowd, writing, “it was great to get in one more successful drive in front of a bunch of colts fans.”
It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for Brady, who accidentally beaned a media buyer with an errant pass meant for Rob Gronkowski during Fox’s May 12 upfront presentation in New York.
While Fox seems to have benefited from Nielsen’s recent expansion of its out-of-home ratings coverage, the network also may have gotten a bit of a lift by way of the elimination of a blackout rule that has prevented fans in central Indiana from watching the race on their local affiliate. This year marked just the fifth race since 1911 that viewers in the hometown market could watch via free, over-the-air TV. Per Nielsen, Indianapolis boasts 1.23 million TV homes, making it the nation’s 25th-largest DMA.
Fox is paying an estimated $25 million per year for the rights to the race, as part of a deal with IndyCar that was finalized last June. Prior to Fox’s pickup, NBC Sports held the rights for six years; before that, ABC had served as the race’s TV home going back to 1965, with live coverage beginning in 1986 after decades of tape-delayed presentations.
