Where have all the viewers gone?
Cory Bergman May 10th, 2007
Quoting now from an AP story today: “In TV’s worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.” Everyone has a theory: early start to Daylight Savings Time, poor measurement of DVRs, boring TV shows and broader availability of video online. All of these likely have an impact. The bottom line is that these declines will have a significant impact. Even if people are watching TV as much as they did last year but it’s not being measured properly, the message has already been sent to advertisers: people seem to be watching less traditional TV. That perception is dangerous for the networks, especially when you consider that new digital revenues will not offset a drop in viewership of this magnitude, this fast. Your thoughts…?
13 Comments Add your own
1. Aaron | May 10th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
DVD sales & rentals have a whole lot to do with it. Why bother committing to a show like Heroes or Lost early in the season when you can find out afterwards whether it was worth watching, then add it to your Netflix queue?
The studios don’t mind this deal at all, and to a lesser extent, neither do the networks, if they’re producing the shows in question. (You can bet NBC would never put Heroes on the air if Universal wasn’t producing it.)
The real losers, obviously, are the local affiliates, who don’t see a penny from DVD sales, and lose the prime-time audience they relied on for their cash cow late night newscasts.
Since prime time programming is no longer appointment viewing, newscasts won’t be either. The only option is to give the audience the news on their schedule, not yours. On-demand, build-your-own, podcasts, blogs — that’s where the audience is going, and the local affiliates need to start treating “new media” as the “primary media” instead of a poorly-staffed and underfunded afterthought.
2. discreet_chaos | May 11th, 2007 at 2:15 am
I’d agree with most of the reasons listed in the clip, but I’ll make special mention of the Daylight Savings Time issue.
I was just thinking about it the other day because though I’d definitely watch more 8 o’clock (7 o’clock in my time zone) shows, if all things were equal, there’s really only two that I’ve gone out of my way to watch and since the time-change, they’re probably all that I’ve seen.
And, one of them is available online, where I’ve watched it at least once in the past two months.
3. Tim | May 11th, 2007 at 4:38 am
Let’s not forget the old tried-and-true problem either: moving the shows on the schedule, until we lose track, and can’t find it in time to get into the story that night - so we wander off to do something else.
Example: Some wizard at CBS decides that for the season finale of “Without A Trace”, they’ll move the show from Sunday night back to Thursday! Some percentage of viewers won’t get the news (I dunno, do _you_ pay a lot of attention to network promo commercials?); some other percentage has develped the habit of watching a competitor’s show on Thursday, and the CBS show on Sunday - and aren’t willing to switch just because some network genius decides to screw with the schedule.
Loss of “water cooler effect” aside, this kind of thing is part of why show downloading (and you can count DVR/Tivo as “downloading” in this regard) is only going to increase.
Timeshifting on my part trumps timeshifting on their part.
4. Michael | May 11th, 2007 at 5:40 am
I just totaled up the amount of time in my prime-time season passes from Monday through Thursday this week–8.5 hours. I’ve only been able to watch 3 hours of that chunk live.
That is a very interesting theory, Aaron. I know a few people that missed the first few episodes of shows like Heroes or even Jericho (a few others are slipping my mind), or they fell way behind. Rather than just trying to jump back in mid-story, they are waiting for the Season 1 DVDs to come out.
But not Lost. Whether they like this season or not, everyone I know is still watching Lost live.
5. !nvitedmedia | May 11th, 2007 at 5:58 am
and to think cory’s entry right above this one reminds us that the networks are going into reruns.
you’d think with this sort of a wake up call they’d be cranking out episodes YEAR ROUND.
reminds me of the current iraqi gov’t that intends on taking its 2 month summer vacation…
sure, things are FINE.
6. !nvitedmedia | May 11th, 2007 at 6:01 am
oh, and my first “thought” (since you asked) was to click over to broadcasting and cable and see how they can put a positive spin on this drop in viewership.
i love that site.
7. Hussman | May 11th, 2007 at 6:21 am
I blame high gas prices
8. Stone | May 11th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Hmm….it seems like its more than just TV ratings. Music sales are down almost 20% and until this past weekend the box office take was down too. This trend is deeper than some people realize.
9. Daniel | May 11th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Why should a viewer get interested in a new show anyway? Most likely it will be canceled just as your interest peaks (aka : Invasion, Threshold, Surface et al.)
10. Michael | May 11th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Drive’s another example. I recorded it the first Sunday, but only manually on my TiVo, so when I watched it on Thursday, and they said “An all new episode Monday” which was 3 days ago, well, that’s frustrating. They aired one more episode and cancelled.
Not exactly heartbroken, but eight days? Not even promoting its regular night? It’s just conditioning me that I might as well not even start watching a new show on that network, because it will be gone before the (actual) seasons change–if that long!
11. rb | May 11th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
networks may retrive some of their money (NBC Universal on DVDs) lost in the huge ratings drop but the stations will never recover so why not preempt the networks as often as posible and at key times to advance more local programming that has more than one use?
12. Steve Safran | May 14th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Oh yeah - must be Daylight Saving time.
13. sheniquea | October 31st, 2007 at 12:16 pm
im doing a media course at college and heros has come up on various occassions. i have discussed with others that the reason for a drop in viewings is due to viewer control as you no longer have to watch the programme to know its content this is also because the advanced way of technology allows viewers more of an option. this can be seen as a good thing to viewers however company’s are the ones suffering long term.
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