Mets, Yankees, and the Nielsen Debate That Won’t Go Away

A murky situation around how local-market sports viewership is tabulated by Nielsen and reported has created a scenario in which both the YES Network and Sportsnet New York are still vying for supremacy in the nation’s largest media market. 

SNY, which shows the Mets, announced earlier this month the team was “the most-viewed sports franchise on RSNs in New York across the board,” and said it averaged nearly 257,000 viewers per game locally for the Mets during the 2025 season—more than any other New York–area regional sports network, including the YES Network. The announced figures did not cite Nielsen, as is customary for any RSN or national network announcement of viewership, but were based on Nielsen tabulations of linear viewership. 

YES Network, which shows the Yankees and is controlled by the Steinbrenner family who owns the club, said Thursday that it averaged 293,000 viewers per game for the Yankees, up 5% from last year. That also was a Nielsen figure, and was credited as such, and also included viewership data from its streaming through Gotham Sports, the app it operates in partnership with MSG Networks. 

The YES Network figure conforms to the cross-platform reporting of viewership that is now standard across all of U.S. media, not just in sports. The RSN, however, did not make any comparisons to any other network in its viewership. Nielsen rules typically allow for one network to reference another in its viewership announcements, so long as the comparisons are on a strictly equal basis.

That is all but impossible for YES Network, however, because of Nielsen-related intricacies. The YES Network receives, and pays for, a separate Nielsen report of its Gotham Sports viewership to help report an accredited count of total audience delivery that is the industry standard, similar to what national networks do.

Because that supplemental streaming data is not broadly available to other Nielsen clients, such as SNY, making a direct comparison to other RSNs across all platforms is not permissible under Nielsen rules. Nielsen also does not measure SNY streaming at all, further limiting the ability for full, cross-platform comparison of viewership for the two RSNs.

SNY, meanwhile, did make comparisons to other networks, but only with regard to linear viewership. The RSN’s streaming data, which would not have Nielsen auditing and accrediting, has not been released, but network officials said it was “up substantially” in 2025. 

YES Network did not comment beyond the announcement of its viewership figures. SNY, meanwhile, touted its own 23% rise in linear viewership, mirroring trends seen more broadly across baseball in 2025.

“We’ve seen a really healthy lift across baseball this year, and we’re very pleased to be a big part of that,” SNY president Steve Raab tells Front Office Sports.