NFL Draft Coverage: Rising Viewers, Brand Interest

• by Wayne Friedman , 7 hours ago

Building on its growing NFL game viewership, the three-day coverage of the NFL Draft -- which started last night (April 23) -- keeps growing, now well past 12 million viewership levels on the opening day over the past two years.

Advertising revenue for the NFL draft programming is also climbing.

Analysts expect at least 15% or more national TV advertising revenues on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, NFL Network this year -- topping the $164.1 million pulled in a year ago, according to estimates from iSpot.

In 2025, national TV ad revenues were up 23% from $133.5 million the year before.

Looking at ad revenues by network, last year ABC pulled in $77.6 million in ad revenue from the three-day run, with ESPN at $41.8 million, NFL Network at $30.6 million and ESPN2 at $14.0 million.

Major advertisers included Goodyear, Nationwide Insurance, NFL, Courtyard, and Dr Pepper.

This year more than half the advertisers in 53 categories have raised media budgets from a year ago, according to a report in Sports Business Journal. Walt Disney’s ABC/ESPN has around 135 total sponsorships from 30 advertisers.

Representatives of ABC/ESPN didn’t respond to Television News Daily by press time.

A total of 14 hours will air for the NFL draft - in primetime and daytime -- Thursday (primetime), Friday (primetime) and Saturday (daytime).

Last year first round primetime coverage of the NFL draft on Thursday -- on ESPN, ABC, and NFL Network -- averaged a Nielsen-measured 13.9 million. This was up from 12.1 million in 2024.

By way of comparison, the NFL 2025-2026 regular season live games across all networks and platforms was 18.7 million.

Looking at total viewership -- all daypart from all four networks (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, NFL Network) -- viewership averaged 7.5 million viewers -- 27% more than 2024.