Here's Why You Shouldn't Believe the Gaudy Numbers for Yahoo's NFL Stream

Numbers just in: Yahoo had 33.6 million video streams of the first free global live stream of an NFL Game.
— Peter King (@SI_PeterKing) October 26, 2015

Holy shit! 33.6 million; that's a lot! Mr. King would go on to tweet that Sunday morning's streaming-only game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars netted Yahoo! 15.2 million unique views for the broadcast, which he compared favorably to the ratings numbers for Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football. That all sounds prett-y, prett-y, prett-y good—with a capital Y!—but it is all, unsurprisingly, bunk.

First of all, the game was streamed worldwide. The hashtag for the game was literally "#WatchWithTheWorld." Thursday and Monday Night Football are broadcast to American audiences, with MNF only available to cable subscribers, and TNF goes to an even lesser pool after Week 8, when it is only available on NFL Network. So, fewer people worldwide watched this gimmick, standalone game for free than the largely American cable audiences that tune into the two worst games of the week.

But that's not the most ridiculous part of it.

Yahoo automatically streamed the game to anyone who navigated over to the Yahoo main page. Recode has a nice breakdown of this, but the brass tacks are these: Yahoo says it gets 43 million visitors to its homepage a day—a huge discrepancy from the equally suspect Quantcast figure of 50.2 million uniques a month—and the game autoplayed front and center each time someone typed yahoo.com into their address bar. Yahoo did the same thing with Tumblr, which it acquired in 2013.

Here's more from CNN:

Maybe you find this kind of ratings talk uninteresting, but here's why it should bother you: the NFL and Yahoo are taking victory laps this morning for this thing. To be fair to both, the stream itself was pretty good. Anecdotally, I experienced virtually no issues with accessibility or quality until the very end of the game—when it got exciting, and more people were likely tuning in—and the stream either cut out or the picture was virtually unwatchable. Other than those minor blips, it was decidedly not a fuck up. But if this is a sign of things to come from the NFL, it's bad for football fans.

The NFL could have done both, provide the game on a regular television broadcast and offer a streaming option for the cord cutters out there, but that would be in service to the fans. You know, the people for whom the league talks about providing the best product, the people for whom the NFL says it needs to Protect The Shield. That's not how the NFL actually operates though; Everything the League says is in service to the fans, everything it does proves they don't give a shit about the fans. So, they sold a game to Yahoo for a reported $20 million, giving the tech giant an hours-long, exclusive commercial for itself, which, again, was available virtually everywhere in the world. Everyone is very proud about their phony numbers as a result, leading to this truly amazing statement from an NFL suit:

NFL exec Hans Schroeder was effusive about today's Yahoo game: "This showed us that digital is ready for the NFL." Story in SBD tomorrow.
— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) October 26, 2015

Where has my man Hans been living for the past, I dunno, five-plus years? "Digital is ready for the NFL." No shit, buddy! Take a look at the sports blogosphere, Twitter, Tumblr, Imgur. Please literally open your eyes when you look at a computer and you will see that "Digital" has been owning your ass for years. You just announced in January of 2015 that you were launching a YouTube channel. YouTube!

I know you know what these things are because you suspended at least two Twitter accounts for sharing NFL GIFs. You all can't possibly be this stupid and the NFL still be this successful. I refuse to believe it. I don't want to live in a world where NFL executives make handfuls of millions of dollars and can say something like "Digital is ready for the NFL" on fucking October 25th, 2015 and not be laughed out of the board room.