Bad Bunny halftime show TV ratings fall from previous year's Super Bowl

The Nielsen TV ratings are in for the Super Bowl 60 halftime show and the heavily-hyped Bad Bunny performance failed to even reach viewer numbers drawn in 2025 by Kendrick Lamar, the halftime show performer at Super Bowl 59.

According to the numbers compiled by Nielsen, Bad Bunny averaged 128.2 million viewers, a decrease of more than five million viewers compared to last year's halftime show. In fact, Samba TV, a television audience analytics firm, found that 26.5 million households tuned in for the Bad Bunny performance, a 39% decline from 43.4 million households that watched last year's halftime show.

Samba TV also put together a fascinating graphic showing minute-by-minute audience engagement during the entirety of Super Bowl 60 that really captures the Bad Bunny effect. After viewership peaked at 137.8 million late in the second quarter of the game, it sharply dropped at the start of halftime, remained lower for the duration of the halftime show, then picked back up at the start of the third quarter. Call it the Bad Bunny dip. 

There was much speculation that enlisting Bad Bunny to play the halftime show was a diversity play by the NFL -- even though most NFL players admitted they didn't know who Bad Bunny is and couldn't name a single song of his. Samba TV analyzed demographic data and found that the gains in Hispanic and black viewers this year "were modest" at best, running counter to the narrative pushed by almost uniformly by the mainstream that the Bad Bunny halftime show was a festival of unfettered "joy."

The alternative show put on by Turning Points USA and headlined by Kid Rock drew about 6 million concurrent viewers on YouTube when it streamed during halftime, a figure that correlates with the dip shown in the Samba TV graphic above. Overall, the Turning Points USA halftime show has amassed more than 21 million viewers. Despite the drop-off from last year, Bad Bunny's halftime show was the fourth most-watched in Super Bowl history trailing Kendrick Lamar (133.5 million, in 2025), Michael Jackson (133.4 million, in 1993) and Usher (129.3 million, in 2024).