Look What You Made Me View: Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs’ TV Ratings

This paper uses ratings and viewership data from 247 NFL games played in the 2022 and 2023 seasons to assess the effect of Taylor Swift's relationship with Travis Kelce on the Chiefs’ television audience. We find that Chiefs’ viewership increases by about one-third beginning with Swift's first time attending a Chiefs’ game in the third week of the 2023 season. Supplemental analysis suggests that the gain in the Chiefs’ television audience can be explained both by new fans tuning in and existing fans substituting away from other games broadcast in the same time slot.