According to Variety:
Thursday’s first and only vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin is expected to easily draw more than 70 million viewers when Nielsen national estimates for the broadcast and cable networks are released this afternoon.
Preliminary overnight household figures from Nielsen show that 45% of U.S. households were watching the debate on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, CNN, Fox News, CSPAN, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo and Telefutura. This is a big jump over the 31.6 overnight?rating for the first presidential debate, which aired last Friday and ended up averaging 52.4 million viewers.
It’s fair to assume that Thursday’s debate should draw more than 70 million and perhaps as many as 75 million on the broadcast and cable outlets. PBS also figured to draw about 3.5 million viewers for its coverage, according to early estimates from the public broadcaster, whose ratings are not regularly measured by Nielsen.
- Read the rest on Variety.
What do they mean that PBS’s ratings aren’t regularly measured by Nielsen? How is that possible? Do they just mean that they aren’t regularly reported by Nielsen?
Julia, while the difference between “measure” and “report” may be semantic, Nielsen only measures the ratings of networks that *pay* them to measure their ratings.
So while PBS may not pay for its ratings to be measured, Nielsen may still collect some basic data on everything.
Got it. I mean, the data still shows up for them, they just don’t keep it on hand for years, I assume.
I wouldn’t be surprised it it’s always measured, but perhaps rarely is any attempt made to reconcile/santatize/report the data. Big things like presidential debats, or a new Ken Burns documentary likely get the full Nielsen scrutiny.
Question…what are some examples of other TV events that drew 75 million viewers?
I suppose since this is spread over several networks it’s hard to compare, but in terms of sheer viewers, what is this comparable to?
Frank I do think you’re right that it isn’t really a fair comparison spread out over many networks. So far as I know for any single airing event, only the super bowl and few series finales (M*A*S*H, Cheers, Seinfeld) topped 70 million.
Unless a network is selling advertising, there isn’t much incentive to pay Neilsen to create ‘ratings’ for them. PBS exists whether people watch it or not since it is heavily subsidized by taxpayers who don’t watch it.
TIVO should have a pretty good idea of comparable viewers on PBS vs. cable nets and the big 3. TIVOs data would be more interesting to me than Neilsen since it is more specific but it might creep too many people out to know that their viewing habits were being published nightly (even if it was done anonymously and aggregately.)
the VP debate was stunning. Palin did a decent job faking about 20% of the questions and didn’t even bother answering the other 80%.
i couldn’t help thinking of the end of the movie Billy Madison, when the debate moderator says to Adam Sandler, “Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”