Oy. First Lipstick Jungle, now this from Daisy Whitney at TVWeek quoting Ben Silverman at a keynote at the NATPE conference:
“We don’t get paid for live-plus-seven, but every week we look at that and say, ‘We wish these were the ratings.’ So how do we monetize that?” he said. “There is a real disconnect between a lot of the reporting on the morning-of ratings report that drives so much communication on the health of the media business and specific shows’ health or failure. Things get labeled hit or miss based on limited information on their success.” read the rest on TVWeek.com
Ack. First, what pays the bills are the C3 or C+3 ratings — the ratings for viewership of the actual commercials, with three days of DVR viewing. We rarely get a sniff of those ratings but the whiffs we have gotten pretty clearly pointed out that there’s not much difference between LIVE ratings and the C3 ratings, and there’s definitely wouldn’t be much difference between C3 and C7 (if such a metric existed).
I’m not saying there would be zero difference, but for now close enough to zero that it probably doesn’t matter. The advertisers only want to pay for people who saw the ads fairly close to when they ran, and definitely don’t want to pay for viewers who don’t want to watch commercials!
Can’t say I blame them. But I don’t really blame Ben for trying. Lipstick Jungle’s LIVE+7 numbers are better than it’s LIVE+SD (same day DVR) numbers, but that’s no surprise since they stuck the show on Friday and only about a quarter of the viewers who watch via DVR watch it the same night.
On one side, we’ve got Silverman and company pining for Live+7 to be the standard. No one in the industry seems to care, and advertisers have valid reasons to prefer that ratings standards keep as close to the Live viewing date as possible.
On another side, we’ve got the government, the networks, the industry as a whole bending over backwards to delay the Digital Transition. For some reason, it’s seen as a catastrophe that a few people still haven’t gotten their converter boxes, and still aren’t on cable or satellite.
My question: Why are the broadcast-only, rabbit-ears type viewers apparently so much more important to the industry that DVR viewers? What do the broadcast-only people bring to the table in terms of dollars, that DVR viewers would not? Do we think broacast-only viewers spend more money on things they saw advertised on TV than a DVR viewer would? Are their eyeballs somehow more receptive than DVR eyeballs? The industry sure does seem interested in making sure the broacast-only people are counted, whereas the DVR+7 people don’t matter much.
I think first the networks should cut a little on the duration of the adds during shows.
If i’m right in one hour usually 18 minutes are ads, this is almost the duration of a sitcom!
They should cut to 12 or 14 minutes, and then put some breaks with 30 until 90 seconds. i think the viewer don’t skip this ads. and they can receive the money only from this one, in the dvr audiences.
While I understand his complaint, Silverman’s problem is not that the industry standard is not Live+7, his problem is that he hasn’t figured out how to take advantage of those numbers. His fans claim that he is so innovative with various different schemes he’s come up with, but he can’t figure out how to market the Live+7 numbers to advertisers for product placement and the like?
Clutz, I’m not sure I buy into your accounting for how the TV industry feels about it. Politics, and only politics are driving the delay, and I’m not sure how much the TV networks actually favor the delay. It won’t be delayed forever though — the government has already auctioned off the bandwidth frequencies that will be freed up when analog broadcast dies.
Julia, I agree, but really his problem is that even after LIVE+7 only 5 million people are watching Lipstick Jungle. Any way you slice it, the product placement aimed at the DVR viewers pays more if that numbers is 10 million.
Well, yes, that, too.
I can’t believe I’m going to defend BS….
What he is implying is that L+7 shows healthier numbers for certain shows that he believes have quality. The Media labels the shows as “misses,” or “failures,” and the bad media results in the show never growing. At least that is half of his argument and one I can agree on. Think of it this way, if Networks acted the way they do today it would be highly unlikely that CHEERS or SEINFELD would have stayed on the air.
Also C3 numbers are some what the same. Some TV shows appear to do much better on the C3 chart than on the SD chart. Two shows that immediately pop to mind are FRINGE and NUMB3RS. I know the theory behind why more people watch the commercials of FRINGE, but not NUMB3RS.
It should be interesting to see how FRINGE does with the IDOL lead in on the C3 rankings, see if it still shows that less commercials equals more watched commercials.
Numb3rs is because it is a 10pm Friday show that almost nobody (relatively speaking, and only referring to DVR viewers) watches SD.
Edit: I went back and ran some numbers, to calculate LIVE7 vs. LIVE+SD my cursory conclusion is while some shows see bigger bumps in C3 than other shows measured against each other, in terms of gains versus live viewing, I would surprised if any show did *much* better in terms of commercial viewing. Better yes. 5% perhaps. When you say much better, are the gains 10%? 10% isn’t nothing, but it’s not the kind of thing that would (theoretically on any other network besides NBC) make a difference for the renew or cancel prospects of Lipstick Jungle.
For the one week I ran data for — which included a fair number of repeats, Numb3rs had the sixth overall most DVR viewers who watched other than the same day (trailing DH, Grey’s, NCIS, Mentalist and ER) with much lower overall viewing than of those but ER.
Robert, the C3 numbers on the two shows I mentioned were both above 10%, but I meant in “rankings,” both those shows are much higher ranked on the C3 list.
I’d need to see the numbers, and Numb3rs is as good of a case as any. The last week we have data for ~15% of its viewing came via DVR and ~78% after the day the show aired. But figure the bulk of the 15% happens within 3 days.
Are you saying the commercial viewing increased over 10% from C to C3?
Our viewing metrics are a bit apples to pears when compared to C3, but even with a viewing increase of 15%, I’d be very surprised if that produced increases to commercial viewing of more than 10%.