The more you know: more people watched a 34 minute technical-foul than watched every super bowl up until 2009. 

And that program, aptly titled ex-post-facto by the Neilsen Rating people as “delay”, was the #4 television broadcast of all-god-damn-time

The fourth-most-watched broadcast in TV history?

Sunday’s Super Bowl blackout.

 

Number-crunching Nielsen Media has broken out Sunday’s 34-minute game shutdown in New Orleans as a separate show and given it the name “Super Bowl XLVII Delay.”

“Delay” averaged 107 million viewers.

“Delay” has been trimmed to 30 minutes in Nielsen’s records: 8:41-9:11 p.m., a.k.a. not long after the end of Beyonce’s halftime show — and lasting twice as long as her performance, BTW.

The 107 million people who sat through a whole lot of nothing and ad breaks is a bigger crowd than watched the Super Bowl in 2009 and all Super Bowls before that.

So thank the Washington Post for reminding me that people will literally watch anything these days.