Nearly half of the households that watched the Super Bowl tuned out halftime performer Bad Bunny, per Samba TV.
This also represents a 39 percent decline in Bad Bunny viewers when compared to last year’s halftime show.
“Our latest viewership insights reveal,” writes Samba TV, that “48.6M U.S. households tuned in to #SuperBowl LX, pepresenting a 13% decrease from last year’s game[.]”
As far as Bad Bunny and his halftime show, Samba reports: “26.5M U.S. households watched #BadBunny’s #halftime performance, down 39% from Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 show[.]”
The reason you’re seeing preliminary headlines based on Nielsen ratings that look like this — “135 million tuned into the Super Bowl” — is due to the difference between “viewers” and “households.”
Nielsen measures viewers. Samba TV measures households. Samba TV also gets its data directly from about 50 million smart TVs where the owners opted in to have their viewership habits measured.
That doesn’t mean Samba TV is superior to Nielsen. Both are respected in the TV and advertising worlds, and the data they produce is not seen as an either/or choice but as complementary.
At the very least, Samba is using apples-to-apples data. What I mean is that Samba has collected its data the same way for years, so the comparison from this year’s ratings to last year’s has credibility as far as trends, which, in this case, are way down.
The question now is, Where did all those halftime viewers go?
There was an alternative, and the TPUSA’s All America Halftime Show definitely made a ripple in the culture. Imagine what they will be able to accomplish next year with more time to plan and advertise.
Everyone sees this as a whole new world where the culture is becoming Balkanized, where the internet allows us to retreat into our own cultures. The truth, though, is precisely the opposite. What’s new is mass culture. In the 6,000 year-old history of human civilization, mass culture (via national magazines, then radio, then movies, then TV) has only been around for about 150 years. For most of human civilization, for better and worse, most people had no idea about other cultures.
I much prefer us unplugging from the Los Angeles/New York Matrix and figuring things out on our own.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
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