The Boston Red Sox-Los Angeles Dodgers 2018 World Series on Fox saw a noticeable drop in viewership compared to last year.
Over five games, the 2018 World Series averaged 14.3 million viewers. That is a drop off of 23% compared to the 2017 average of 18.7 million. In fairness, the 2017 World series–which also featured the Dodgers–ran all the way to Game 7 so the comparison is an imperfect one. This year was also the least watched World Series since 2014, when the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals averaged 13.9 million viewers over seven games.
The 2018 World Series is thus far the fourth-least watched since 2010, with the most-watched being the Chicago Cubs versus Cleveland Indians series in 2016, which averaged 22.9 million viewers thanks to the Cubs ending their historic 100-plus year championship drought.
Game 5 was the most-watched game of the Series, however, averaging 17.6 million viewers. That is also up 29% over the viewership for Game 4. The rest of the games of this Series drew the following viewership:
-Game 1: 13.8 million
-Game 2: 13.5 million
-Game 3: 13.3 million
-Game 4: 13.6 million
On Fox Sports streaming platforms, Game 5 was the fourth-most-streamed game in World Series history, garnering an average-minute audience of 240,000. That is up 40% from 2017’s Game 5 , which averaged 172,000. And while this year’s series was only five games, the overall average-minute audience of 198,000 is up 9% from 2017’s seven-game average of 182,000.