Huge attrition during AVP League broadcast on The CW
Pro beach: Audience for premiere plummets 58% from first half-hour to last
The debut of the AVP League on The CW network Saturday night lured 409,000 viewers to sample the telecast’s first half-hour, precisely what the owners of the domestic pro-beach volleyball tour envisioned when they shelled out millions to bring their product to national broadcast television.
That sort of mainstream exposure was deemed vital by the AVP’s latest ownership group — fronted by commissioner Bobby Corvino — in an effort to cultivate a new base of rank-and-file sports fans.
Now for the bad news: The telecast abjectly failed to retain its audience.
By the third half hour of the two-hour telecast only 167,000 viewers had stuck around, according to the Nielsen ratings as reported by the popular Programming Insider website. The prime-time show (8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern) checked in with a total-average viewership of 261,000 and a rating in the 18-49 prime demographic of 0.11. The CW averaged 445,000 viewers in prime time in 2024.
The League’s premiere on The CW, a secondary over-the-air platform, performed similarly to the indoor Pro Volleyball Federation’s All-Star Match on legacy giant CBS, which peaked at 445,000 viewers. In the AVP’s other previous venture with The CW, a one-off Sunday afternoon telecast over the Labor Day Weekend in 2024 of the Chicago AVP Heritage Series finals posted a total-average viewership of 215,000.
That 409,000 at one point on Saturday were motivated to tune into the League no doubt was uplifting to the AVP and its new television partner.
The discouraging word was that the initial League broadcast shed an immediate 110,000 viewers to 299,000 — a loss to 26.9% — during the second half-hour. This alarming attrition continued in the third and fourth half-hours, which averaged 167,00 and 169,000, respectively.
Overall, the telecast lost 58.6% of its audience from the first to the fourth segments, hardly desirable for a new show looking to make a favorable first impression. TV ratings cannot definitively tell us why something happened, merely that something happened. But as All Volleyball! detailed in its story on Sunday, a logical extrapolation would be that neophyte casuals didn’t stay engaged to a business-as-usual presentation that seemed more geared to the existing die-hard fan base.
A further educated guess is that the eyes of curiosity-seekers dropping in for look-see were drawn to the empty seats and the tiny crowd likely numbering in three figures — and they opted to change the channel.
Then, too, the volleyball action on their screen was far from captivating. The women’s match that led off the broadcast immediately was non-competitive. Canadian Olympic silver medalists Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson of the host Palm Beach Passion roared to an 8-0 lead in the first set against the far-less-experienced pair of Hailey Harward and Kylie Deberg, representing the Dallas Dream, and the rout was on.
The sizable drop from the second to third half hours might be explained by a 10-minute break between the men's and women’s matches that was pretty much wasted air time. It included a lengthy recap of the NASCAR Xfinity Series race shown earlier on The CW, which is a far-more-important (and exclusive) property to the network.
After that excruciating break, the men’s match pitting USA Olympians Miles Partain and Andy Benesh and the “Dream Team” of retiring all-time great Phil Dalhausser and resident bad boy Trevor Crabb also proved to be one-sided. As Olympic gold medalist and four-time American Olympian Dalhausser (representing the Passion) noted in his postmatch interview, the Dream’s duo of phenomenal lefty Partain and the 6-foot-9 Benesh has gained considerable separation from the rest of the USA men’s field. It would be no surprise to see Miles and Andy go undefeated again in League action.
As (buzzard’s) luck would have it, the two nationally televised matches on The CW were the shortest of the eight held in the Delray Beach Tennis Center over two nights, leaving the talking heads with oodles of dreaded “fill time” during the final half hour. Partain and Benesh needed only 30 minutes to dispatch Phil and Trevor, while Brandi and Mel won their match in 31 minutes.
In South Florida during the League’s first weekend, all of the teams competing (the Passion, Dream, Brooklyn Blaze and defending champion San Diego Smash) went 2-2. Partain and Benesh won both of their matches with ease, and Julia Donlin (nee Scoles) and Lexy Denaburg of the Blaze were a surprising 2-0, including a three-set upset of the Canadian superstars (15-13 in the tiebreaker).
The League will move indoors to the Viejas Arena on the campus of San Diego State on June 7-8, the second of eight regular-season stops. The Smash and Dream will be there, joined by the Los Angeles Launch and Austin Aces.
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