Per Andy Hall at ESPN PR, viewership for the midnight Monday-Friday “SportsCenter” with Scott Van Pelt is up year over year from 642,000 to 683,000.
While the show’s viewership is very lead-in dependent it was lead-in dependent last year too! Considering “Monday Night Football” is down double digits year over year it seems pretty impressive.
Update: while I love SVP and am in the tank for him, I got some clarification on the time periods measured in the above calculation. Per Andy Hall it’s a comparison of the period of 12/29/14 – 12/06/15 to the period 12/28/15 – 12/06/16 for the midnight edition of SportsCenter (which became SVP edition on 09/07/15).
That basically compares a year where SVP was doing the midnight SportsCenter ~25% of the time with a year where he was doing it 100% of the time. I was curious about the year over year comparison since Labor Day (a pure SVP vs SVP comparison) and when I do the comparison that way I have the midnight SportsCenter down Y/Y which isn’t a big surprise given the double digit declines for Monday Night Football.