TVSquad

Nielsen Media Research has released a boatload of Super Bowl related ratings data, including the first ever "live plus same day" Super Bowl ratings, which account for PVR users who watched the big game a little bit later than the rest of the country.

The game itself got a 32.8 rating, while the average commercial got a rating of 32.1, meaning that 92.8 million people were watching those horribly overpriced ads. Does that mean they were worth the money advertisers were spending on them? Probably not, but that's a lot of eyeballs (roughly 185.6 million of them, in fact).

The highest rated moment of the game was at 9:10PM, when 99.9 million viewers were tuned in. What, 100 thousand people had something better to do and couldn't make it a nice round number? Sorry, that's the inner Monk in me speaking.

The most watched commercial was a Hewlett-Packard ad that ran at 9:25, with 99.5-million viewers. And the commercials that got the biggest boosts from PVR playback were by Career Builder and Doritos. Each commercial time-shifted by 2.5 million PVR users.

Other fun facts:

• 101 commercials were aired during Super Bowl XLI, running for a total of 44 minutes and 10 seconds.
  
• Career Builder's web site saw the biggest jump in online traffic following the game.
• A Nielsen online poll showed that viewers that watched the game in high definition could recall 15% more of the commercials.
• Anheuser-Busch ran the largest number of commercials, and there were more beer commercials than any other category.

Nielsen also has great web page with storyboards and video clips from Super Bowl commercials over the last 9 years.