Always On: Consumers Who Watch Sports Daily

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As NBCUniversal showcases its 2026 live sports offerings to advertisers at the Upfronts, we’re going to take a dive into the audience of consumers who watch sports on TV or another device daily. Since January 2023, the share of consumers who are watching sports daily has risen four points to 17%, though growth has stagnated more recently.

This is one of the hundreds of behaviors we survey about every day to help drive insights about how consumers are behaving. Clients can explore this audience more in-depth here, or read on for some quick insights. Want access? Get in touch here.

Let’s Go Deeper: Demographic of Daily Sports Watchers

These consumers are far more likely to be men
73% of consumers who watch sports on TV or another device every day are men.

They overindex heavily on X
These consumers are far more likely to be on every social media platform, but on X they overindex against the general population by 20 points

Daily sports watchers are competitive
More than three in every four of these consumers describe themselves as a competitive person that “wants to win,” which is 18 points higher than the general population

They’re earning more money
One in every five consumers are earning more than $100k a year

The sports leagues they overindex the most on compared to the general population…
…are NCAA Men’s Basketball, the NBA and NCAA Football.

Extra Credit

One of the powerful use cases of MorningConsult.AI is the ability to quickly build brand rankings amongst hyperspecific audiences. Let’s use our daily sports viewer audiences and see what the most popular athletic apparel brands are. You can see below that Nike and Adidas are winning this highly engaged audience, but also that all the major sporting apparel brands do quite well.

Our new AI tool is available for anyone to try for free. Give it a spin here.