NBC announced that Super Bowl XLIII, which saw the confrontation between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals, registered the highest television audience ever for a National Football League championship.

 

The Steelers’ eleventh-hour victory over their opponents drew approximately 98.7 million viewers on average, easily surpassing last year’s tally by 1.2 million, the network said on Tuesday in a statement, explaining that the data had been provided by Nielsen Co.

Moreover, NBC explained that it had established a Super Bowl advertising record as well, with about $206 million in sales for the game.

 

The network managed to attain this impressive result in spite of the fact that many traditional marketers such as General Motors Corp. and FedEx Corp. had withdrawn from the project because of the worsening U.S. economy. NBC announced that it had also reached a new mark for ad revenue with regard to the whole broadcast, as it grossed $261 million in sales from pre-game to wrap-up.

 

The adjusted Nielsen reports came one day after preliminary results showed that 95.4 million viewers tuned in for the game on Sunday night. Although the ratings were not bad at all, the result was far from being a record-setter. Nielsen said that the difference of over 3 million viewers had been noticed after additional check on the company’s records, which revealed viewership on numerous digital tier networks. Nielsen had apparently been unaware that the respective networks aired the game on Sunday.