We got a peak at the C+3 commercial ratings for the first week (September 22-28) of the season via articles today in TVWeek and MediaDailyNews. Those C+3 commercial ratings, which we do not have regular access to, measure how many people actually watched the commercials in shows within 3 days of the airdate. We have been told by many people in the industry that it’s these C+3 ratings that advertisers base their rates on. So, C+3 commercial ratings are all that matters. All the other numbers on our site, and pretty much everything you see elsewhere in the media, are program ratings which measure program not commercial viewing.
The stories revealed the C+3 adults 18-49 ratings for the top 10 shows and the top 4 networks on average for the week of September 22-28, 2008. The Live+SD 18-49 data is from information we regularly get from Nielsen.
| Show | Net | 18-49 C+3 commercial rating | Live+SD 18-49 program rating | C+3/ Live+SD ratio |
| Grey’s Anatomy | ABC | 6.97 | 7.4 | 94% |
| Sunday Night Football | NBC | 6.47 | 6.9 | 94% |
| Desperate Housewives | ABC | 6.35 | 7.1 | 89% |
| CSI: Miami | CBS | 4.99 | 5.2 | 96% |
| Dancing With the Stars | ABC | 4.86 | 5.3 | 92% |
| House | FOX | 4.72 | 5.1 | 93% |
| Two and A Half Men | CBS | 4.72 | 5.3 | 89% |
| The OT | FOX | 4.59 | 4.9 | 94% |
| NFL Pre-Kick Sunday | NBC | 4.46 | 4.5 | 99% |
| Fringe | FOX | 4.10 | 4.1 | 100% |
| Network | 18-49 C+3 commercial rating | Live+SD 18-49 program rating | C+3/ Live+SD ratio |
| ABC | 3.49 | 3.8 | 92% |
| NBC | 3.14 | 3.3 | 95% |
| CBS | 2.83 | 3.1 | 91% |
| FOX | 2.65 | 3.0 | 88% |
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I draw a few conclusions from these numbers:
- DVR viewing past the airdate is meaningless for show revenue. In no cases was the C+3 commercial rating greater than the Live+SD program rating, so no viewing numbers past the time period covered by Live+SD are meaningful for advertising revenue. Networks may tout, and we may track, Live+7 DVR viewing, but it’s not meaningful to the business. Fans hanging their hopes on show renewal based on Live+7 audiences should take this to heart.
- Fringe’s reduced ads/show experiment may be working. I hesitate to draw conclusion based on one week’s data, but it’s all we’ll likely see of C+3 so why not. The fact that Fringe had the highest ratio of Live+SD program viewing to C+3 commercial viewing points to the possible effectiveness of their reduced commercial load per show strategy.
- In most cases, Live+SD program ratings are a good indicator of C+3 commercial ratings. Although there are exceptions. Note that Desperate Housewives had a better Live+SD program rating, but Sunday Night Football had a better C+3 commercial rating. Also, since all we see are program ratings, I’d hate to think they had no relationship to the numbers that actually matter to the business.
Am I understanding this correctly? By my understanding, top-rated shows are retaining not only program viewership, but ~90% or more of the commercial viewership within three days of DVR.
I think the Fringe experiment is intriguing! Less commercial time does seem to be translating to a higher level of commercial viewership.
This does give me some hope that shows with significant DVR viewership gains (House and Grey’s spring to mind)are not necessarily losing commercial viewership; networks ought to be able to sell advertisers on that concept. The missing factor, though, is a comparsion of two items:
1) Live+3 program ratings versus Live +3 commercial ratings
2) Live+SD program ratings versus Live+SD commercial ratings
In other words, do DVR viewers skip commercials more than live/same-day viewers?
Clutz, commercial viewership of the shows listed above was in the 89%-94% range of the live+SD program ratings (18-49 ratings in this case).
You are correct it would be *very* nice to compare Live+3 program ratings to live+3 commercial ratings and the same thing for live+SD as well. Realistically we will never see that data, or the comparisons…anywhere. I can’t even be sure that Live+3 program ratings or Live+SD commercial ratings are even regularly produced by Nielsen.
Fringe is unique,though it’s not surprising that if there are fewer commercials more people watch them. But Fox has implemented this nicely by announcing how many seconds the commercial breaks will last (”Fringe Will Return in 60 Seconds”, etc).
Robert —
While I agree with your larger point about the relatively small “real” benefit that DVR viewers have on programming, you left out a very important point.
Before the move to the C3 standard in September 2007, ads were bought and sold on LIVE ratings only — no other data stream was relevant when it came to advertising.
So it doesn’t really matter that, as you point out, C3 ratings are uniformly lower than Live SD numbers. The more meaningful comparison would be between the old (Live) and new (C3) sales “currencies”. For more than a year, C3 ratings have consistently outperformed Live data by between 5 and 10 percent.
To use your Grey’s example: that 6.04 A18-49 C3 rating for the 9/25 premiere is a full 8% higher than the Live number (5.46) that would have been used under the old system.
Alex, Your statement that C+3 always outperforms Live program ratings isn’t true based on this limited data sample.
Again, we only have data for 10 shows, but for half of them the C+3 rating was higher, and for half of them the Live rating was higher.
Thanks for the quick response Bill.
I know you’re hampered b/c of the limited program data you have, but that 50-50 split is pretty misleading. Three of the ten you listed (SNF, SNF Pre-Game, The OT) are sports programs. Sports — and the NFL in particular — remain uniquely resistant to DVR’s undermining its live audience, which of course also means that they will never see a sizable C3 boost.
So it’s not really fair to lump DVR-friendly entertainment programs with sports, particularly when sports programming represents such a small portion of total primetime programming. In fact, I think that those Sunday programs account for 3/4 of the sports on prime in a normal week (Sat Night Coll Fball or Nascar would be the other). When you take out sports, you start to get a more realistic and consistent pattern.
For example, of the 8 original (non-sports) programs that ABC aired during premiere week, 6 had higher A18-49 C3 vs. Live ratings (and by an average of +6%). Only Dancing With the Stars and Makeover declined — and the decline was miniscule (average of -1%). Most reality shows will fit this pattern of stability. I know I’m close to writing a full term paper over here, so thanks for staying with me. The last point is that if you look at some of the other key sales demos aside from A18-49, you usually see an even larger C3 impact. 7 of 8 of ABC’s premiere week shows went up in C3 among Women 18-49, and the only holdout (Dancing) did not move at all from its Live number. Wow — that was long!
Is this C+3 ratings system(top 10 shows) going to become a regular for this site? If these C+3 ratings is really the only thing that matters, then… I think that’s mostly what I only care about now as well. lol
Who watches commercials anyway? Doesn’t everybody just switch to another program when commercials come on?
Alex, I appreciate all the information, if you’d like to share any on a more regular basis drop me an email
With that additional information, I would agree that selling based on C+3 would on balance be better than selling based on Live ratings.
The original point of the post though was that the Live+7 numbers aren’t useful in any way as a advertising revenue indicator. I think that still holds.
And while we see Live, Live+SD and Live+7 numbers from Nielsen, since the press uses Live+SD exclusively for all ratings comparisons, that’s pretty much what we focus on except in our DVR specific posts where we use a combination of Live and Live+7 data.
Cookson, I wish they would be, but Nielsen doesn’t provide them to the press. We’ve been looking for someone willing to share, and will keep doing so. In the meantime, we will continue to use the 18-49 Live+SD numbers as our indicator of advertising revenue success.
123, by reading this blog (or really any blog), you’ve already self selected yourself into a group that’s more technologically saavy than the average person. I skip commercials, Robert skips commercials, *you* skip commercials, but the viewers counted in the C+3 ratings don’t skip the commercials.
Bill said:
but the viewers counted in the C+3 ratings don’t skip the commercials.
But they do. You are really still trying to compare apples and, well, older apples.
For argument’s sake, let’s say that a C+3 commercial rating for a show is as high as its Live program rating. That doesn’t mean that people haven’t skipped any commercials. It means that in the two days after Live day, enough people have watched the commercial pods so that the number of commercial-pod watchers has caught up with the number of people who watched the program on Live day.
If you had data for commercials and program within the same time frames, you would most definitely see a difference between commercial-pod viewing and program viewing for all shows, even sports.
That said, I do have one technical question. When you say that your national Live+SD data is program-based, does that mean that it’s “stenciled out” excluding the commercial pods (like in Germany, for example) or is it “beginning to end” from the first second of the program to its last second, including the commercial pods (like in France)?
I think the internet ate my earlier comment… so I’ll try again.
Bill said: the viewers counted in the C+3 ratings don’t skip the commercials.
But they do. You’re still trying to compare apples and, well, apple cores.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a show has the exact same Live+SD program rating as its C+3 commercial rating (as “Fringe” does). This only means that in the two days after Live day, enough people watched the commercial pods of the show to catch up with the number of people who watched the program on Live day.
Your Live+SD program data obviously cannot increase after Live day, but the (unkown) Live+SD commercial-pod data, which is bound to be lower than the program data, has another two days to grow to its C+3 level.
To be able to make any meaningful statement about commercial-pod avoidance, you would need to compare commercial-pod viewing data and program viewing data for the same time interval.
Ray, I have no idea why our spam filter ate your comments, I reclaimed them.
And as for your comment, we are in agreement, perhaps I just wasn’t clear.
What I meant is that C+3 counts commercial watching, no more, no less. It was in response to 123 who asked “who watches commercials?”.
You are absolutely correct in everything that you wrote as well. I didn’t mean to imply that the ratios between C+3 and Live+SD that I calculated were anything but relative comparisons between those 10 shows.
As for your question, I believe Live+SD measures end to end watching of the entire show including commercials, but unless Robert knows for sure, I’ll fire off a question to Nielsen.
The LIVE+SD averages measures total live viewing minutes and DVR viewing minutes up to 3am local time and then divides them by the show’s duration. a 60 minute show with 600 million minutes viewing would yield 10 million viewers.
If you’re watching program A and then switch to program B during commercials, your minutes while switching to program B do not count for program A. On the DVR side, what Nielsen claims is that minutes of DVR viewing spent fast-forwarding or skipping commercials (edit: or actual content, for that matter) are not counted into the viewing minutes. I’ve read conflicting reports re: DVR counting the time spent skipping commercials, but if you contact Nielsen they will surely tell you otherwise.
Thanks, guys, for the responses (and for saving my comments from the spam monster).
Robert, I did know that – we call it a “p value” in Germany, because every panel members is assigned a p(robability) based on time viewed divided by length of program. My question referred to what the frame of reference is for program data, never mind DVR viewing. In France, when they report viewing to a particular show, it will be a weighted average of all parts of the show and all commercial pods in between. In Germany, we exclude the commercial pods when we report program data.
Anyway, it’s not a terribly important question, but the answer would further inform your program/commercial ratings ratios. That, and I’d been wondered about that for a while.
I think placement of commercials should be considered. When I’m watching something I’ve DVRed, I usually watch the commercial immediately following the segment of the show I just watched before I remember “Oh yeah. This is recorded. I can fast forward.” and the commercial immediately preceding the next segment of the show so that I don’t miss anything. Also while I’m fast forwarding the other commercials, I do notice some of the images and words in large print – sort of like a power point presentation. Whereas, when I’m watching a show live, I get up and go the kitchen or elsewhere.
While advertisers and the broadcast networks focus C+3, what they are ignoring is that was relevant two years ago. In the next five years, Live+7 isn’t even going to be that meaningful in terms a show’s real audience. Many not only “time shift”, but also “season shift” and the numbers doing so are growing. So what’s important?
We’ve already seen that many of the top shows are seeing 25%+ increases in viewers with Live+7. If significant numbers of people start season shifting, the game as it’s played now is meaningless.
For instance, I’m not a baseball fan. So with my recordings I can start filling in my schedule – yes, my schedule – with this season’s episodes of The Unit and Heroes because some of the Fox shows I usually watch aren’t on and next week even CBS is scheduling reruns on Monday night.
By late November through early January, I’ll have caught up on some shows. Others, like Knight Rider and Pushing Daisies, I’ll save until my late spring and summer season.
And yes, sometimes recordings get screwed up. Just this past month I’ve had to watch two episodes of Life on NBC.com but that’s not showing up in C+3 either.
Anyway, you get the idea. The 1950’s system of TV watching is gone. It’s just the business side that has to catch up. And numbers for Live and C+3 aren’t relevant to the change.
Of course, I don’t count as I’m in the technologically challenged group “over 60″ but some of those youngsters the advertisers are looking for know how to use this stuff better than me.
at least NBC can somehow count your viewing of Life on NBC.com and sell ads for it. I’m a massive season shifter myself though I don’t do typically do this via DVR (more of a DVD/iTunes thing where there is at least a business model). I agree what gets measured and how will ultimately have to change a lot, as well as the ad models themselves. For now, overwhelmingly most people are still watching TV on TV so my guess is C+3 has some life in it yet.