Super Bowl streamer Tubi is free, owned by Fox — and very popular with Black audiences

Fox-owned Tubi will stream this year’s Super Bowl — a rematch of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Philadelphia Eagles, which went head-to-head in 2023. The streamer is popular with Black audiences.

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Tubi is a free streaming service owned by Fox Corp.It is also very popular with Black viewers, who make up nearly half its audience.Tubi doesn’t market itself as a Black streaming service. But it also says it’s happy to have those viewers.

The Super Bowl is a big event for Tubi, which is streaming the game for free: It’s a chance for the service to introduce itself to a huge audience that might know little, or nothing at all, about the Fox-owned streamer.

But if Tubi isn’t a household name throughout the US, it definitely has pockets of fandom throughout the country. One particularly big pocket: Black audiences.

Nielsen says nearly half of all viewing — 45% — on Tubi came from Black audiences in December. That’s a much bigger percentage of Black viewers than any other streamer — which saw an average Black audience of 19.5% in December — and it’s also much bigger than old-line TV — which saw an average 16.4%.

For context: Tubi says it reaches about 100 million monthly users. And it routinely challenges or beats the likes of Peacock, Paramount+, and Max in Nielsen’s streaming ratings.

All of which puts Tubi and its corporate parent in a slightly weird spot: It most definitely doesn’t position itself publicly as a streamer that appeals to Black audiences. But if you ask company executives about it, they’re happy to discuss it.

“We have real momentum with Black audiences, and we’re really proud of that,” says Tubi CEO Anjali Sud.

So on the one hand, that means Tubi is intentionally looking for movies and TV shows it thinks will appeal to Black viewers. On the other hand, Tubi insists that it’s interested in servicing all kinds of niches, like gay and lesbian viewers, or Gen Z viewers.

Tubi’s popularity with Black audiences existed before Fox acquired the company for $440 million in March 2020. Farhad Massoudi, Tubi’s cofounder and former CEO, didn’t set out to make a streamer that appealed to Black viewers. He was just interested in building a streaming service that relied on software and algorithms to tell him what people watched.

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud says she’s proud of the streamer’s momentum with Black audiences.

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“We do have a huge African American audience, and basically, our data showed that there is a big demand from those users, and we decided to lean in,” he told me in July 2020.

Sud, who took over Tubi in 2023, says she’s continued in the same vein. Tubi has actively tried to buy and develop material it thinks will appeal to Black audiences. But she thinks it can do the same for other audiences: “We believe we can achieve the same kind of resonance with other audiences,” she says. “But we got the signal faster with Black audiences.”

Tubi’s appeal to Black viewers hasn’t gone unnoticed by its competitors, some of whom try to turn it into a negative. Talk to folks about Tubi at rival streamers and you’ll hear references to “audience quality” — a suggestion that marketers won’t pay as much to reach a Tubi viewer.

Sud, not surprisingly, says that’s not true: “There’s only one metric that matters in terms of quality. That’s engagement.”