Despite all the controversy surrounding Bad Bunny's halftime show at Super Bowl LX, the ratings from Nielsen are awfully impressive.
There was plenty of outrage on social media when the NFL named Bad Bunny its lead performer for the Super Bowl halftime show. Turning Point USA tried to compete against the NFL by creating its own show, which included Kid Rock, Gabby Barrett, Lee Brice and Brantley Gilbert.
According to The Athletic, the "All-American Halftime Show" with Kid Rock had as many as 6.1 million concurrent viewers on its YouTube. While that's an impressive number, it doesn't compare to the ratings for Bad Bunny's halftime show.
It was announced Tuesday night that Bad Bunny's halftime show at Levi's Stadium had an average of 128.2 million viewers. That's a huge win for Apple Music and NBC, make no mistake about it.
Bad Bunny was unable to dethrone Kendrick Lamar, who drew 133.5 million viewers at last year's Super Bowl. However, he made history on YouTube. His halftime show has already landed over 61 million views in less than 48 hours.
© Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images.
Super Bowl peaked with Bad Bunny.
This year's Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks averaged 124.9 million viewers on Sunday. That means the show had its highest audience during the Grammy Award winner's halftime show.
Ari Meirov pointed out that Bad Bunny's performance generated over 4 billion social views in the first 24 hours, which would make it the most consumed halftime show of all time.
“Bad Bunny is, and I think that was demonstrated last night, one of the great artists in the world and that’s one of the reasons we chose him,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said prior to the Grammy Award winner’s performance. “But the other reason is he understood the platform he was on and this platform is used to unite people and to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talents and to be able to use this moment to do that and I think artists in the past have done that.”
We'd have to imagine the NFL is glad it chose Bad Bunny for this year's halftime show.