(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
It looks like a record number of Super Bowl viewers stopped watching once Bad Bunny started his halftime performance on Sunday.
That’s according to a new report from Front Office Sports on Wednesday, with reporter Ryan Glasspiegel explaining on X:
Based on my understanding of the data, Bad Bunny lost more [percentage] of the Super Bowl viewership from the end of the second quarter than has ever happened before.
His conclusion is based on quarter-hour ratings data from Nielsen.
Glasspiegel reported 135.9 million people were watching the NBC and Telemundo broadcasts between 8:00-8:14 p.m. ET on Sunday, before dropping to 128.2 million combined viewers between 8:15-8:29 p.m. That exodus of 7.7 million viewers lined up with the halftime show.
“Bad Bunny’s performance occurred during the latter window,” he explained. “This was a decline of 7% from the game’s peak viewership of 137.9 million in the second quarter, and 5.7% from the immediately preceding quarter-hour.”
The article noted that the audience typically increases for the halftime show during most Super Bowls, but last year’s performance from Kendrick Lamar also took a dip when it shed 4% of viewers who were watching towards the end of the first half.
Glasspiegel also added a caveat by pointing out both the Seahawks-Patriots game this year and the Eagles-Chiefs game last year looked over by the time halftime began, which probably didn’t help Bad Bunny or Kendrick Lamar. His article did not include Nielsen data on the 15-minute segment immediately following Bad Bunny’s show.
Still, the 128.2 million viewers who watched Bad Bunny was still more than the 124.9 million viewers that the Super Bowl broadcast averaged on Sunday. Nielsen data released on Tuesday showed this year’s game averaged 2.8 million fewer viewers than the Eagles-Chiefs matchup in 2025; it also showed Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show was watched by 5.3 million more people than Bad Bunny’s performance.
As many have noticed, Bad Bunny was a controversial pick that divided a lot of viewers along partisan lines, with many supporters of President Donald Trump opting to watch Turning Point USA’s “All-American” halftime show instead.
Scores of Pro-MAGA viewers weren’t thrilled that Bad Bunny’s performance was entirely in Spanish, and it happened just a week after he bashed ICE while making a speech at the Grammy Awards. Conservative media star Ben Shapiro praised the “incredible” staging of Bad Bunny’s show — which was set in a sugar cane field — while saying he wasn’t as big of a fan of the “plethora of butts on the screen.”
President Trump was less charitable, branding the show “terrible” and saying it was a “slap in the face” to Americans.
TPUSA’s halftime show did pretty well, pulling in about 5 million live viewers during its peak, according to what Mediaite could see. Headline performer Kid Rock did get mocked by many people online for lip-syncing his 1998 song “Bawitdaba,” though.
The post Bad Bunny Reportedly Lost Record Slice of Super Bowl Viewers Heading Into Halftime Show first appeared on Mediaite.