(credit: Jaguars.com ) Over the weekend, the NFL and Yahoo streamed the first ever online-only NFL game , a Bills/Jaguars matchup in London. The game was mostly seen as an experiment for the NFL to test the viability of online distribution for a football game. Yahoo seems happy with the turnout, trumpeting 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total views for the game. The site also claims 33 percent of the streams came from international users. As Deadspin notes, the numbers were seriously pumped up by Yahoo thanks to auto-playing streams on the Yahoo and Tumblr homepages. Anyone who visited either high-traffic homepage counted as a viewer for the game. Still, Yahoo notes that “460 million total minutes” of the game were streamed, which means that each of the 15.2 million viewers hung around for an average of 30 minutes. When the Yahoo/NFL deal was announced, a CNN Money report said that Yahoo paid “at least $10 million” for the rights to the game. The game was available for free online, supported only by advertising. Yahoo promised advertisers 3.5 million viewers in the United States, so things seem to have gone better than expected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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First ever online-only NFL game draws over 15 million viewers
