World Series Ratings

World Series Telvision Ratings Breakdown

hint: if you charted it, it over the last 20 years it would look a lot like the NBA and NHL.

DVRs Save Thursday Nights

According to this story from the Hollywood Reporter, ABC had success with Thursday nights for the first time since the Barney Miller days (well over 20 years) by switching Grey's Anatomy to Thursday nights. Because I'm long winded and have not yet refined my writing skills yet let me tell you the most important thing right now: CBS says that HALF of its viewership for the CSI that runs Thurdays vs. Grey's Anantomy is people watching on DVRs. HALF. HALF. That seems...shocking and outrageous...but cool as hell if it's true.

While I did sort of taste the Grey's kool-aide, I did so primarily because it became socially impossible to have a decent conversation with any woman over the age of 33 because there were simply too many Grey's references that I wasn't aware of.

To me, this show has roughly about the same appeal as an Internet chat room or Craig's List. Right in front of you, characters who are way more screwed up and depressing than anything you have going on in your own life. But Grey's notches this up because unlike most flakes in an Internet chat room the people actually have good jobs and are beautiful and ARE STILL MISERABLE AS HELL. This is a show about a bunch of people who have great lives but are chronically miserable as hell.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this story to me was the quote from CBS Research Chief, David Poltrack. Because although CSI on CBS did feel the pain of Grey's moving to Thursdays, it wasn't problematic according to Poltrack.

"In a non-DVR world, this would have been a tough situation for the viewer and for CBS in particular because 'Grey's' comes in there and people have to make a decision whether they're going to watch 'CSI' or 'Grey's,"' Poltrack said. "But with DVRs, people were able to watch both." Half the "CSI" viewership comes in playback mode, according to the CBS data.

Nielsen to Begin Ratings for Ads

Later this month Nielsen plans to release viewership data for advertising spots. Advertisers are concerned and not just that people are using DVRs and fast-forwarding through commercials, but that they are getting up during the ads and not watching them. We've always done that of course, but the concern is we're doing it a lot more lately.

The article references tactics that advertisers are toying with to win back viewers to ads.

I have a simple plan: somehow turn every commercial into some kind of lottery. The prizes don't need to be that big if you're keeping millions of extra eyeballs tuned in. The problem is that you'd have to be creative in integrating the lottery into the ads, otherwise nobody is paying any attention to the product being advertised.

I've been watching a lot more TV than normal this year. I've even done something I almost never do: watch live broadcast TV for things other than sports. I watched the last few episodes of Heroes live, without any timeshifting on the big screen, in high definition. Everything looked great and even many of the commercials were in HD.

But the commercial breaks are simply too long.

During this year's finale of Grey's Anatomy, in addition to the actual show not being that good, the commercial breaks were unterminably long. So long that even though I was watching the recording of it off my DVR and was pressing down the 30 second skip button, I was having to press it more times than I'd ever had to in my life

There were commercial breaks that were nearly 5 minutes in length. In 5 minutes, I can get up, use the bathroom, wash my hands, get a drink of water, go send a couple of e-mails...

I understand the point with a successful show is to capture as much ad revenue as you can in the finale, but to that end, it was already an extended finale (it ran 1 hour in 20 minutes in real time, with commercials) extending spots themselves was just encouraging people to tune out.

Ultimately with the Nielsen data on ad viewership what I'd love to see is how many people watched the first ad of the break and at least part of the last ad, compared to the ads in the middle.

I think those advertising in the middle probably saw a significant drop off of viewers, while the last spot before the show came back on probably did very well. What I'd like to see from the Nielsen data is what the dropoffs are, by each spot running in the break. There's probably a bigger delta between the viewership of the middle spots and the last spot than there is between the pricing of those two spots.

Or I'm just plain wrong, but we'll know soon enough when the study is released.

Sad about Cubes Being Sad

It doesn't take much to make me sad, really. And seeing Marc Cuban's blog entry regarding Donald Trump made me sad.

I'd like to think he is just distracting himself over how the Mavs ended the season and isn't envious that Trump's show ran for several seasons while Cuban's own reality-based TV show had only a very brief run.

I'd like to think that if I had what Cuban had I wouldn't even ponder Mr. Trump or his hair other than to laugh it off. I was also disappointed that Cubes restricted access to comments on that message.

Cubes is a smart guy and he has access to the ratings and so the one thing he knows is even though "The Apprentice" languished in the overall ratings this past season, it still scored consistently well in the coveted 18-49 with household income above $100,000 demographic.

There is no reason to feel sorry for the Donald. He'll be just fine.

Why isn't NASCAR on FOX?

Let me say straight away: I'm not in NASCAR nation. I like DRIVING REALLY FAST. Watching other people drive really fast doesn't do much for me.

But we're in a world that does not need much of an excuse to DRINK BEER! Capitalism LOVES anything that gets people excited about having an excuse to drink. NASCAR seems to accomplish this in spades. My friend Bill G. (the OTHER Bill G.) says that NASCAR trumps all other sports besides the NFL. Better than baseball, better than the NBA, and certainly better than the NHL.

My question is this: why doesn't FOX milk NASCAR for all the beer consumption it possibly can? I ask this because this past Saturday there was some kind of NASCAR event running on the SPEED channel. With a gun pointed at my skull, I couldn't tell you what channel the SPEED channel is. But still, it pulled over 3 rating and at it's peak had well over 3 million homes tuned in according to this story.

That crushed ANYTHING on Fox that night, according to these ratings so you figure if the things was on FOX it would have likely done much better than the 3 on speed plus the 1.x rating on FOX.

Why wasn't it on Fox?