I praised NBC earlier in the year for the experiment with TAMi – the total audience measurement index that seeks to measure the total viewing of shows on various platforms and not just television. While I do appreciate the attempt, I am no longer finding it praise-worthy and find it mostly useless because the comparisons and numbers used are apples to pears or apples to grapes style comparisons at best, and apples to orange comparisons at worst.
The standard Nielsen audience average numbers reported by us and others are engagement based. It’s measuring total minutes of viewing and dividing it by the duration of a show. If there are 600 million minutes of viewing for a one hour show, that show will show an average of 10 million viewers. Engagement based measurement compared to engagement based measurement is the only really worthwhile way to go.
Unfortunately TAMi doesn’t use this, not even for television where it uses the “total audience” Nielsen measurement. These are people who watched at least 6 minutes of a show, but not the whole show and there is no way to garner total engagement from such numbers.
Similarly, the Internet streaming counts are bogus. For one, if a single episode is broken up into six streams, it counts as six streams, even if it was only one episode. Further, streams are counted whether they are completely viewed or not. There’s no way to derive the total engagement from that (total minutes of viewing divided by episode length) and so there’s no basis to compare them to anything useful.
Because it’s not truly an engagement based measurement, it’s of little real value. Except for this: FINALLY we have numbers from iTunes. And guess what? The numbers are TINY – EVEN WHEN THEY WERE GIVING AWAY SHOWS. Oh sure, there were more than 10x as many downloads for the free episodes NBC gave away on iTunes (which leads us to believe downloads on Amazon Unbox are likely in the hundreds, if not the tens, since they are included as well).
The most downloaded episode surprisingly (at least to me) was the first (and free) episode of Knight Rider. Heroes is really the most downloaded show and after the freebie (which got 58,886 downloads) the second and third episode dropped to less than 20,000 downloads. So please excuse us if the next time we hear someone chime in about a show being number on iTunes and acting like it makes some significant difference and we tell them to STFU.
Again, because the data isn’t engagement-based focusing on total minutes, either for television or the streaming data, it’s mostly useless, but for including the download numbers we thank NBC profusely! The bottom line is TV is still king, though streaming is growing. But, unless and until they provide minutes of streaming, it will be difficult to get a true idea of what portion of viewing of shows happens via sanctioned streaming channels.
You can download the full slide show (PDF) with data for all shows, but note some data for certain shows is missing. For example there is no download or mobile data for Chuck even though it is available on iTunes.
I’m all for more information and I definitely think each number by itself may have some value, at a minimum to reveal trends, but the fact that they ADD THEM ALL TOGETHER when they are measuring completely different things betrays the entirely PR focused nature of the exercise. Look at our big numbers! Please pay no attention to the fact that our TV ratings are cratering.
I wouldn’t mind them adding it all up — in fact, I’d like it very much –if it was engagement based. Then it would be extremely useful. I also wouldn’t mind “total audience” if there were some useful way to get at it like Nielsen’s “at least six minutes”. But when six streams can equal one person for an episode and a streams that are almost immediately aborted can be counted…worthless.
A great article Robert. Very informative and educational.
Keep it up!
It seems that the only way that the iTunes data is useful is if it is looked at as a separate chart entirely of its own. As in, here is what people are buying on iTunes.
I totally see your point that it has nothing to do with the real time TV ratings. The article did raise a question in my mind about DVR ratings. I can understand why those are more useful since the DVR is “engaged” for the full hour of recording the show. But, do they also keep track of half hourly data for DVR shows like they do for the real time viewing? So, suppose someone only recorded the first half of a show, how would that reflect in the DVR ratings?
I guess I’m not understanding how this “six streams equals one show” works. They stream all six in order, so that six parts make up one episode?
If that’s the case, doesn’t that mean that if all six streams were started then the person at least made it most of the way through the show? Unless they don’t know which streams were shown? Then it could be that either a few hundred thousand watched an episode, or millions of people started the first stream and then stopped watching.
Mike G, I agree, “here’s how show’s do on iTunes” is an interesting slice, but it’s so tiny compared to broadcast I’m not sure how interesting it is. As for the DVR question, what Nielsen tells us is that it is viewing, not recording that is measured. So if you watch 15 minutes of a one hour show, you’ll count for 15 minutes worth. If you record only a half hour, but watch the whole half hour, as Nielsen has explained it to us, were you a Nielsen home the 30 minutes of viewing would count.
Frank, on NBC.com some shows (though not all) are broken into 7 minute or so clips. Six of them make up one episode. If you watch the whole episode this way it will count as six streams instead of one. Also it’s not clear that clips that are just clips (short, and not intended to be the whole episode) aren’t counted as well, and it’s pretty clear if you start the stream it’s counted whether you finish it or not. To the degree one person started all six streams I think it’s fair to assume they made it through the full stream for at least five of them, but we have no way to separate that vs. anything else. Without minutes of viewing per stream, it’s useless in terms of comparisons.
Wow! I never thought iTunes and other such downloads were huge, but they are much smaller than I thought. I figured a high of around 200,000 for popular shows, not 60,000.
Great title by the way.
Holly, and to be clear, the biggest numbers (tens of thousands) for NBC show downloads are for *free* episodes.
Paid episode downloads are much fewer.
Robert, do the advertisements play at the beginning of each stream, or do those have to download separately? I’m thinking that maybe NBC doesn’t care so much how many different shows were watched, just how many ads were watched.
I just saw this: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/10/16itunes.html
iTunes has sold over 200 million episodes total, of over 30,000 episodes available. So it averages out to something like 7,000 per episode. Not much to brag about.
Julia, and we suspect many of those downloads in that 200 million were free, not paid, but it’s mere speculation.
FrankJ, it’s not worth getting into since NBC isn’t reporting ad viewing here. I’m sure what matters most is ad impressions, but there’s no way to really derive that either as you can’t even assume that one stream equals at least one full ad view.
Everyone wants to control their own TAMI so they can [control] give advertisers a reason to keep spending. That’s not a sustainable system. NBC has nothing to lose here, since their normal ratings don’t typically put them on top. It needs to be third party, neutral ground, however, it’s hard when the distribution channels are so different amongst all the networks. Perhaps Nielsen will pull off something.