Television Ratings Makes No Sense
Recently I have been totally stumped on several fronts in regard to how the television networks program their shows. My biggest question was why do they take hot and popular shows right in the middle of the season and put them on hiatus? I always thought this seemed to be contradictory to common sense. If you have built an audience and they are coming back week in and week out to view your show, why when there is such immense competition out there, would you all of a sudden pull the show for several weeks or months?
I was reading an article tonight on CNN which answered that question for me. The article discusses how bad NBC is doing in the ratings, but toward the end of the article it said something very interesting:
“NBC notes that TV viewership in general is lower, with all of the broadcast networks down 10 percent from last year over the past three weeks, and that the network has been airing several reruns to hoard original series episodes for the May ratings sweeps.”
So, in other words, the reason NBC chose to take their hit show Heroes off the air not once, but twice for weeks at a time was to save episodes until May sweeps which based on those ratings determines what the networks can charge for their ad rates. I never understood “sweeps”. Why can a network charge a certain ad rate based on such a small period of time? Why don’t they charge based on an entire season instead of a couple of weeks? It kind of reminds me of how boxing does their weigh-ins. A boxer is weighed in the day before his fight when he has to be a certain weight. After that the boxer can go to town and weigh anything he wants for the actual fight itself. I love when I hear the announcer of a fight say something like, “he weighed in at 155 yesterday and he is 173 coming into the fight tonight.”
The networks are saying to advertisers that the Thursday night 9-10 pm time slot gets on average of 2 million viewers, but for May sweeps when we ran our best programming, we garnered 6 million viewers so that is what we are going to charge you whether it is sweeps or not.
Am I missing something? Can someone set me straight?
Technorati Tags: television networks, CNN, NBC, May sweeps
Unfortunately this is the way it has been for some time, and I do not see it changing. This is a point to make about the mass media being totally out of step with what the world is doing today. But then…
We talk about web 2.0 but is there really a change in how the world is moving? Look at how the Internet has effected your life. Now look at how it has effected your parents life. Then look at how it is going to effect our future society. Our children are already learning more from smaller niches in the media than we did. (video games, internet)
How would you monetize your blog if it was only from page views? Will TV eventually move to a pay per action for advertising? Will the structure of TV be the same 5 years from now? Will the major player in TV catch up? Again this is the way it has been for some time, and I do not see it changing, since so many large corporations do not know what one department is doing from the next.
So expect every year your favorite show will be on hiatus this time of year!
Or maybe I am just rambling to myself… but May sweeps SUCK and are out dated in todays world.
Mark – I don’t think you are rambling at all. In fact, I could not agree with what you are saying more. I guess my question is why do advertisers put up with this?
Who needs rankings because my experience is when I start watching a new show it tanks within 3-4 weeks. Since I have these powers of making sure the world does not have to waste time on engaging in a new show the networks should pay me to watch new shows so I can be the only ranking system needed. This is why I watch only re-runs of shows ie; Law and Order, CSI, Seinfeld etc.. If I watched these shows when they first came on history shows they would never had made it.
You nailed it buddy. Nuff Said.
There is technology now (and has been for some time) that will allow a much finer grain and likely closer to accurate accounting of what TV is being watched, and by whom. It’s not hard to instrument a television set to not only track what’s being watched, but also sense if anyone is in front of the set during the commercials. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to determine which family members are in front of the set too.
Why doesn’t this happen? My guess is that likely the answers would be so radically different from what Nielsen (and the networks) have been telling advertisers for so many years that there would be huge discontinuity in the industry that would threaten Nielsen’s core business.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Nielsen still requires panel members to fill out logs indicating what they watched.
Tivo is reporting numbers which are instrumentation-based so that’s helping.
This could be BS, but I had heard a while back that there was technology that they could use on highways to determine what over the air radio station someone was listening too as the sped by. I had also heard that the numbers for some of the more risque/shock-jock type shows were much higher than were being reported in the regular ratings books. The theory was that people were embarassed that they were listening to certain shows and fudging their reporting a little bit to make themselves look better.
David – The reason we need ratings is not for you the viewers, but for the networks to price their ad rates for the advertisers. You and I as viewers could not care less for viewers.
Hillel – I agree there must be technology out there to track down to the minute, but the only way that the networks and ad buyers will want to do this is if the advertisers themselves force them. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Thanks for the comments.