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Golf fans shocked as latest LIV Golf vs PGA Tour TV ratings are revealed

Golf fans react as TV ratings are revealed from last weekend's LIV Golf Mayakoba and PGA Tour's AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Golf fans have been reacting to the latest TV ratings following LIV Golf 's first event of the season at Mayakoba and the PGA Tour 's AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which was reduced to a 54-hole tournament following a final-round washout.

With no live golf played on Sunday over on the PGA Tour, it left the door wide open for golf fans to head over to The CW Network should they so wish and view the final round of LIV Golf Mayakoba in Mexico. 

It was also a particularly strong leaderboard heading into the final round too, with Joaquin Niemann leading by two strokes over LIV Golf debutant and arguably the best player in the world, Jon Rahm . 

But despite everything aligning perfectly for LIV Golf in the final round, unfortunately its viewing figures on The CW Network were close to five times less to that of CBS Sports ' third-round coverage of the PGA Tour's AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am , which ended up being the final round due to bad weather.

Wyndham Clark was crowned the winner after surging into the third-round read following a stunning 60 , which marked the lowest-ever round at famed Pebble Beach.

It was not the lowest round of the weekend, however, as Niemann fired a course-record 59 in the first round at Mayakoba. 

While Clark's round marked the lowest of his blossoming PGA Tour career, the 60 did not count as an official record at Pebble Beach as a result of preferred lies being in place. 

Niemann ended up defeating his former mentor Sergio Garcia at the fourth extra hole in darkness over at Mayakoba, while Rahm led his new Legion XIII to a four-stroke team victory despite throwing away the individual title when finding the penalty area with his tee shot down the 17th. 

PGA Tour trounces LIV Golf

According to official TV ratings from the weekend's action in the men's professional game, CBS had 1.951m viewers during Saturday's third round.

In comparison, LIV Golf's second-round action on Saturday drew 168,000 viewers on The CW Network but an improved 432,000 viewers on Sunday. 

Pebble Beach PGA (Saturday), CBS: 1.951m LIV Golf (Saturday), CW: 168K LIV Golf (Sunday), CW: 432K https://t.co/I7csAFZ3vK — Sports TV Ratings (@SportsTVRatings) February 6, 2024

What must be taken into consideration is the above numbers do not include streaming available on both the LIV Golf Plus App and the LIV Golf YouTube channel. 

While these figures have not been made official, LIV Golf's final round YouTube video has amassed 165,000 views. 

One big positive for LIV Golf is the fact its final-round coverage of the first event of the season on The CW Network was superior to that of its first event in 2023, also at Mayakoba, which had 291,000 viewers. 

So it's not all bad news for LIV Golf. 

Golf fans have been reacting to the latest TV ratings on LIV Golf and the PGA Tour over on social media, so we encourage you to head over to our GolfMagic post on both Facebook and Twitter and get involved in the debate. 

Some fans think its very unfair to compare the two Tours without knowing how many viewers came through the LIV Golf Plus App, while others believe LIV Golf will never reach PGA Tour TV ratings no matter how much money is pumped into the Saudi-backed circuit. 

Which tournament did you watch last weekend? Did you tune into the final round of LIV Golf Mayakoba? Share your thoughts and comments over on the GolfMagic social media channels. 

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Report: PGA Tour ratings increase for NBC, CBS and Golf Channel

Nbc racks up tad of 2.27m viewers across seven pga tour events this season..

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The PGA Tour’s viewership on US broadcasters NBC, Golf Channel and CBS has increased during the ongoing 2023 season, according to Sports Business Journal (SBJ) .

• Through seven events, viewership on NBC increased three per cent year-over-year (YoY) with a total audience delivery (TAD) of 2.27 million viewers
• The Honda Classic and WGC Dell Match Play on NBC were the most-watched in four years
• The Valspar Championship hit a five-year high, with 2.59 million viewers tuning in to NBC for the final round
• Golf Channel has seen a nine per cent YoY jump in its audience through 15 events, notching up a TAD of 519,000 viewers
• CBS has averaged 2.59 million viewers for four PGA Tour events, excluding the Masters, marking a four per cent jump YoY
• The average weekly digital visitors to the PGA Tour’s website rose by eight per cent YoY in Q1 2023, while the number of iOS downloads of the tour’s app were up 60 per cent 
• Video views across the tour’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube channels were up 31 per cent compared to last year
• ESPN reported that streaming of PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ was up “significantly” in Q1, adding that the Genesis Invitational and Players Championship were the most-watched PGA Tour events ever on ESPN+.

This season, the PGA Tour increased its prize funds and put more FedExCup points on offer for several new ‘designated’ events in response to the breakaway LIV Golf circuit. Viewership numbers for those events have seen strong increases over 2022.

SBJ notes that two of the PGA Tour’s tournaments scheduled against LIV Golf’s three events saw a decline in viewership. The Valspar Championship, however, grew its audience for the final round by five per cent, despite going up against LIV Tucson.

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The viewership figures for the PGA Tour will be well-received by its broadcast partners. The numbers also come a little over a month on from the tour announcing a shakeup of its schedule that will see cuts scrapped and tournament formats more closely aligned with those on LIV Golf at certain events from the start of next year.

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What do disappointing Masters final-round TV ratings actually mean?

HILTON HEAD ISLAND — It has become a pressing, even annoying question: What do we make of the 20 percent decline year-over-year in CBS' final-round ratings for the 2024 Masters?

Sports Business Journal reported on Tuesday that the network drew 9.58 million viewers on Sunday. It was the lowest viewership since Hideki Matsuyama’s 2021 win (9.45 million). If you don't count the two COVID years of 2020 and 2021, it was the lowest figure since 1993.

At the RBC Heritage, two players had two very different perspectives, and what they said represented both the underlying truth of what's afflicting professional golf at the moment and the difficulty in analyzing temporary drops in viewership.

"I am surprised by that, to be fair," said Matt Fitzpatrick, the defending champion at Harbour Town. "Obviously you've got everyone playing together, like everyone wants, and the viewership's down. But, yeah, it's bizarre. I think, for me, speaking to people at home and stuff, people are fed up with hearing about the money. I think that's the biggest thing."

"See, I just find it really hard to believe that ratings are down," said Wyndham Clark, sounding a note of disagreement. "I think people that I do know that are watching it loved it. I think golf is growing. I think golf sales have grown. I know golf memberships are growing. It makes no sense at the professional level that the viewership would be down. In my thoughts, is it because everyone is streaming and people are watching it from different avenues than maybe the normal telecast? I think that's a little bit of a skewed stat."

Scottie Scheffler hugs caddie Ted Scott after clinching his second Masters win in three years.

Fitzpatrick is right—there appears to be a real, and arguably now measurable, fatigue among a certain set of golf fans for whom the schism between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf has soured their perception of the men's game and seemingly had some turning elsewhere. And Clark is right, too, both in his contention that golf participation and sales are up across the board, and that more and more viewers are watching the professional game on streaming platforms, which are notoriously hard to measure and which definitely cut into the number of people watching the network telecast (but which were also cutting into that same telecast a year ago).

All of this is to say that discussing changes in TV ratings means recognizing a few caveats that make it harder to draw the firm conclusions that make for a more enticing headline. For instance, take PGA Tour ratings, which are our best lens for putting the Masters drop into context. Up to the Masters, the tour had been averaging 2 million viewers on Saturday and Sunday telecasts in 2024, down from a 2.2 million average a year ago. This includes drops of 35 percent for the final round of the WM Phoenix Open, 30 percent at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and a 15 percent overall at the Players Championship.

That seems to tell a story by itself, until you recognize a few other factors. For one, while streaming options are basically the same compared to a year ago, the hours of content have increased, including 185 hours of live competition for the Players, counting the multiple streaming airing coverage on ESPN+ during a given round. (In 2022 and 2023, PGA Tour Live was most the consumed live sport on ESPN+.) "Digital visits" for the tour are actually up 18 percent compared to 2023, digital users are up 16 percent, and social views have increased to 125 million per week, another 16 percent increase from last year. On social media, the tour had its largest engagement week ever during the Masters—the first to surpass it surpassed 13 million in engagement—and that’s without even having video rights to the tournament.

More Golf Digest Masters coverage

In terms of TV ratings, tour officials can legitimately argue that they've been unlucky in 2024. The final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was canceled due to bad weather, and the Phoenix Open had significant weather delays that forced the final round to conclude after the start of the Super Bowl. In addition, players from the top 10 in the tour’s Player Impact Program metric—in other words, the most popular players—have only won three tour events in 2024. Meanwhile, the two tournaments prior to the Masters, the Houston Open and the Valero Texas Open, saw increased viewership over 2023. Take all that, throw in the digital growth and consider that leagues including the NBA, NHL, and NASCAR are all down from 2023, and you start to wonder if the dip in golf ratings means much of anything at all.

Even so, a PGA Tour source acknowledged "fan fatigue" as a legitimate phenomenon, one the tour is taking seriously. While acknowledging it exists, what’s difficult is knowing what effect it actually has on ratings. And even when ratings are down overall, they may not be down in specific, important ways; ratings were down at the Players, but peak viewership was almost identical, and total viewers in the 90 minutes before the conclusion were down, but not by nearly as much. (Mind you, you can argue that the growth in recreational participation and equipment sales means that even stagnancy in TV ratings for the professional game is a failure signifying something broken in the professional game; how can you fail to capitalize on a legitimate cultural trend?)

We don't have streaming data from ESPN+ or Masters.com, but we do know that Thursday and Friday's opening rounds broadcasts on ESPN were its highest rated since 2015 . That didn't continue into the weekend, obviously, but the same mitigating factors that can apply to the tour's declining numbers could factor in here, too. For one thing, the final round lacked drama after the back nine. For another, the 20 percent drop is in comparison to a year when there was significant intrigue surrounding the first major that saw PGA Tour and LIV golfers meeting on a major stage for the first time … not to mention a late charge by Phil Mickelson and a duel between Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka.

Caveats aside, it’s hard to see the ratings as anything but bad news. Even if streaming is up, the TV deals with CBS and NBC are a major source of revenue for the tour (and for the majors), and infinitely more valuable than anything they get from streaming or social. If those networks can't sell as many ads, then the tour’s hopes of getting more than the $700 million deal it signed through 2030 when the next deal is being negotiated will be particularly challenging. In other words, considering the ultimate payoff, a hit to the actual terrestrial ratings is a big deal that is not offset financially by gains in other sectors. Sources tell Golf Digest that there's real concern at NBC/Golf Channel about declining ratings, and that CBS executives was extremely disappointed in its Masters numbers, particularly as the network broadcast weekend coverage of tour events for the next 12 weeks.

As you can tell by the layers of disclaimers that pile up each time you try to discuss ratings, it's extremely hard to quantify how "tired" fans have become of the PGA Toutr-LIV hamster wheel, or whether viewers are truly abandoning professional golf in droves (if they are, they're not going to LIV, whose ratings remain anemic). It passes the smell test, but the dozens of caveats that come with interpreting ratings end up introducing a kind of paralyzing effect when it comes to reaching any conclusions; the more you know, the more complicated it becomes. What's not complicated, though, is that numbers are down in relevant ways, and that’s happening during a time of unprecedented growth in recreation golf spurred on by the pandemic.

"I've actually been pretty amazed this year with the fatigue I have from all of this garbage going on," Max Homa said, adding that in-person events have been terrific, and that he feels hopeful after a recent PAC meeting that the tour has great future plans in place to engage fans.

"I think we hit this year-and-a-half or two-year rut as both golfers and golf leagues that was just about making the players happy, and unfortunately and quite obviously the fans were not benefited by that," he said. "I'm very hopeful that at some point here soon, we've been shown that we are nothing without those watching us, and they can stop watching us whenever they'd like."

Some have, and the numbers reflect it; what remains to be seen is what the solution might be, and, if such a solution is implemented, whether something critical has already been lost.

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How massive Masters TV ratings compare to PGA Tour, LIV Golf’s

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Jon Rahm's Masters victory produced huge ratings.

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It’s a really, really good morning to be CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus.

On Tuesday, CBS released a monster Masters ratings report from the weekend at Augusta National that showed the highest final-round ratings for a golf telecast on any network in five years.

Per CBS’s release, the network averaged some 12.058 million viewers during the five-plus hour broadcast window on Sunday afternoon at Augusta National, peaking with some 15.021 million viewers at the conclusion of Jon Rahm’s victory around 7 p.m. ET. The average audience represents a jump of some 19 percent over Scottie Scheffler’s snoozefest final round in 2022, a massive viewership jump for both the tournament and the sport writ large.

That final round average (12.06 million) is pretty spicy. Massive number for the Masters and CBS. (A reminder: total viewer data means mostly nothing in the context of ratings.) https://t.co/Gk9DxT0x0P — James Colgan (@jamescolgan26) April 11, 2023

The news comes as particularly sweet to Augusta National and CBS, who worked in tandem to ensure the tournament could both be completed on Sunday (on account of rain) and, once that was solidified, to change the broadcast window to provide coverage of the majority of the final day of play.

The final-round numbers, while impressive, were needed for CBS considering the schedule changes, which resulted in only 15 minutes of national broadcast time on Saturday afternoon on account of the weather. That Saturday broadcast earned criticism from golf fans for its seeming lack of foresight about a dreadful weather forecast, and while the decision not to adjust the Sunday window was Augusta National’s (not CBS’s), the drop in viewership from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning likely cost the network a significant chunk of average viewership.

Fortunately, most (if not all) of those viewers were made up by the drama created by Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm’s final-round clash at Augusta National. It’s hard to know precisely what drove higher-than-average viewership to the tournament on Sunday, but it’s likely some combination of the LIV storyline, a pair of high-profile golfers knotted in the final pairing and Sunday’s wall-to-wall coverage contributed to it. It’s also possible that golf’s Netflix docuseries, Full Swing , played some role in driving higher-than-usual numbers of casual golf fans to tune in on Sunday afternoon.

Whatever the case, though, the numbers were good — across the board. ESPN’s first and second-round coverage drew slightly lower ratings year-over-year, but those numbers were skewed by weather costing the network its highest-viewership period in the late-Friday window. Over on Golf Channel, Live From posted its highest two viewership days ever from the Masters, recording 1.1 million viewers each day.

In the greater scheme of golf’s current viewership situation, though, the numbers present an intriguing trend to monitor. While PGA Tour viewership has held steady (averaging around 2 million viewers on normal weeks), and LIV has managed to wrangle audiences averaging a few-hundred-thousand people, the majors could be the beneficiary of a surge in casual viewership amplified by the LIV-PGA Tour undercurrent.

It’s early to say with any certainty whether this trend will continue. A runaway winner could score terrible ratings at next month’s PGA Championship, or the momentum could fail to carry over to June’s primetime viewership at the U.S. Open. But for now, the news is good, and McManus knows well enough to take that and run with it.

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James Colgan is a news and features editor at GOLF, writing stories for the website and magazine. He manages the Hot Mic, GOLF’s media vertical, and utilizes his on-camera experience across the brand’s platforms. Prior to joining GOLF, James graduated from Syracuse University, during which time he was a caddie scholarship recipient (and astute looper) on Long Island, where he is from. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Rbc heritage continues trend of pga tour designated events delivering huge tv numbers, share this article.

The PGA Tour’s designated events are working, just look at the numbers and ask the networks.

A week after CBS reported the final round of the 2023 Masters was the most-watched golf broadcast in the past five years, the network drew 4.152 million viewers Sunday for the 2023 RBC Heritage, up 13 percent from last year. The final round – which included a three-hole playoff between eventual winner Matt Fitzpatrick and defending champion Jordan Spieth – was the most-watched final round of the Tour’s season (Masters aside).

The final round of the RBC Heritage finished behind three NBA playoff games as the fourth most-watched sporting event over the weekend.

As reported by the Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter , the final-round duel between Fitzpatrick and Spieth was the most-watched final round of the RBC Heritage since 2002, which also featured a playoff between Justin Leonard and Heath Slocum and boasted 4.575 million viewers. SBJ also noted  all but one of the eight designated events on the Tour’s schedule – the Sentry Tournament of Champions – has earned a year-over-year increase in viewership so far this season.

The Tour’s next designated event, the 2023 Wells Fargo Championship, will be held May 4-7 at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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