How many people watch the Eurovision Song Contest final?

How to get close to this number

Read the question rather than the slug: it asks for the audience, not the advertising rate. Estimate from participating countries — around forty broadcasters, each reaching a substantial share of their national population on the night — and the sum lands in the hundreds of millions.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that surprises an American reader: a larger audience than the Super Bowl. A contest almost unknown in one large country outdraws that country's biggest broadcast, because it aggregates forty national audiences rather than one.

The longevity is the other claim worth keeping: running since 1956, the longest-running annual international televised music competition in the world. A format that has survived seventy years of television changing completely around it has done so by being a national event in forty countries simultaneously rather than an international one anywhere.