The MindShare Top 50
The World Cup reset the chart, and it isn’t close. The final group-stage week on home soil was the most-watched in the tournament’s history: USMNT–Turkey (June 25) drew 17.02M on Fox plus another 7.4M on Telemundo and Peacock, roughly 24.4M combined and the most-watched telecast of that day on any network. Mexico–Czechia did 12.3M on Telemundo alone. Colombia–Portugal pulled about 18.4M combined on a Saturday. Fox aired matches in primetime every night, the group stage averaged ~9.65M combined per match (double 2022), and Fox says 84M Americans have watched some coverage. Add it up: an estimated 273M US attention-hours inside one Monday-to-Sunday window, and a new 52-week peak of 887M, up from the 337M the Knicks set three weeks ago. The World Cup is the new 100.0.
And it forced a methodology change, shipping with this edition. Under the old math, a score was your share of the 52-week peak, taken straight. Against an 887M peak that read “100.0, then nothing above 14”: technically accurate, useless to read, and about to recur every knockout week and every Super Bowl. So as of v5.3 the score is the square root of share-of-peak. Nothing upstream changed: same attention-hours, same multipliers, same benchmark, same rank order. The curve just stopped pretending cultural attention is linear. Pre-v5.3 scores aren’t directly comparable; the methodology page has the details.
Beneath the tournament, a real week. Olivia Rodrigo’s album week finally hits the Index at No. 2 (34.0): thirteen tracks in the US Top 200 at 91.1M combined streams, “stupid song” holding Spotify’s No. 1. House of the Dragon’s third season lands at No. 3 (32.9) off a 21.5M-viewer global premiere and a wire-to-wire run at No. 1 on the US charts. The Bear dropped its entire final season June 25 and enters at No. 14. Toy Story 5’s $70.8M second weekend lands at No. 5 while the 1995 original charts at No. 13 on Disney+ beneath it. The NBA Draft (4.2M viewers) and the BET Awards (2.6M, best 18-49 since 2019) both make the board. The World Cup line itself aggregates roughly 20 in-window match and studio windows on Nielsen average audiences, scored at standard live-sports depth: the championship weighting stays in reserve for the knockout rounds. Those start next week.
And it forced a methodology change, shipping with this edition. Under the old math, a score was your share of the 52-week peak, taken straight. Against an 887M peak that read “100.0, then nothing above 14”: technically accurate, useless to read, and about to recur every knockout week and every Super Bowl. So as of v5.3 the score is the square root of share-of-peak. Nothing upstream changed: same attention-hours, same multipliers, same benchmark, same rank order. The curve just stopped pretending cultural attention is linear. Pre-v5.3 scores aren’t directly comparable; the methodology page has the details.
Beneath the tournament, a real week. Olivia Rodrigo’s album week finally hits the Index at No. 2 (34.0): thirteen tracks in the US Top 200 at 91.1M combined streams, “stupid song” holding Spotify’s No. 1. House of the Dragon’s third season lands at No. 3 (32.9) off a 21.5M-viewer global premiere and a wire-to-wire run at No. 1 on the US charts. The Bear dropped its entire final season June 25 and enters at No. 14. Toy Story 5’s $70.8M second weekend lands at No. 5 while the 1995 original charts at No. 13 on Disney+ beneath it. The NBA Draft (4.2M viewers) and the BET Awards (2.6M, best 18-49 since 2019) both make the board. The World Cup line itself aggregates roughly 20 in-window match and studio windows on Nielsen average audiences, scored at standard live-sports depth: the championship weighting stays in reserve for the knockout rounds. Those start next week.