Wow, everyone and their mother is writing about Mark Cuban being accused by the SEC of insider trading violations.

Mark says the charges are false, but can’t really say much more.

I’ve seen people comparing this case to Martha Stewart’s. Stewart didn’t go to jail because of insider trading violations. In fact, I think even the government understands that if your stock broker calls you up and says I think you need to dump your stock, which is what happened in Stewart’s case, from Joe the Plumber to Martha Stewart, most will listen and sell the stock.

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Like Mr. Gorman, I am a fairly black and white person. But when it comes to the topic of whether there’s any value to the ads viewed while fast-forwarding during DVR playback, I think the answer must be, “yes, there is *some* value, but not nearly as much as actually watching the commercial.”

Bill and I are less exposed to any of this because unlike the unwashed masses of DVR users, we’ve programmed our remote controls with 30 second skip buttons. We don’t fast-forward, mostly we just zap them altogether. So for us, typically there is zero value to the advertisers because we see almost no ads whatsoever when we do this. But only a small portion of the DVR universe has reprogrammed their remote controls to take advantage of this.

I agree with Bill that we will see studies like this until the business model is completely changed. Then they will vanish. Although I’m not sure that what won’t change is the ads themselves, which at least for a while will be more and more designed to entice you to hit “play” while fast-forwarding through them.

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Due mostly to comments on this blog, I’ve thought a lot more than I otherwise would’ve about why some shows appeal to a broad audience and some shows don’t.

For purposes of this discussion, I am making no commentary regarding the quality of shows. Quality is a very subjective metric. There are many factors at play beyond quality anyway. There’s a show’s time slot, what it’s competition is, and yes, how much money the network spent promoting a show.

Networks are often derided for the same old same old. Whether it be crime procedurals or unscripted reality contests. But who can blame the networks for sticking with formulas that generally work? What some fans want to know it seems is “why” it works out the way it does.

At a general level, it’s pretty simple. The easier the buy-in, the better the chances of success. Here’s something we buy into easily: competition and contests. So whether it’s American Idol or Survivor, if you can make it entertaining and interesting a relatively large portion of the audience already buys into the premise. This buy-in is a very critical factor.

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Forget the polls, the pundits, the politics, the Presidential election is all about the “Law of 14″ and Freshness.

This article from Jonathan Rauch in reasononline about who can and cannot win the Presidency, is 5 years old*, but just as valid today as ever. I love quantitative rules applied to non-quantitative situations, and I bet other readers of this blog may as well.

I am a bit worried about injecting politics into our site, but my feeling is that since the Freshness “Law of 14″ is all about numbers, we can handle a single post. [Disclaimer: I'm not voting for either McCain or Obama, I've voted Libertarian for the last 20 years.]

Here’s a summary of Rauch’s “Law of 14″, but I’d encourage you to read the entire article:

As every grocer knows, many products have sell-by dates. Bread lasts a day or two, milk maybe a week. Well, presidential aspirants have a sell-by date, too. They last 14 years.[...]

With only one exception since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president. [...]

“Major office” means governorship, Congress, or the mayoralty of a big city: elective posts that, unlike offices such as lieutenant governor or state attorney general, can position their holder as national contender.[...]

Let’s handicap this year’s race:

• Obama (4 years after election to Senate in 2004) = Fresh.
• McCain (26 years since election to Congress in 1982) = Not Fresh.

That indicates a win for Obama.

This is no consolation for the fans of Hillary Clinton. She was Fresh enough to have won this year (8 years since election to the Senate in 2000) or in 2012 were the Republicans to win this year, but a win by Obama this year puts her next likely chance off until 2016 when she will be Not Fresh.

Could Republicans have given themselves a Freshness chance this year? Yes. Mitt Romney (6 years since election to Governor in 2002) was Fresh enough to have won, so was Mike Huckabee (10 years since election to Governor in 1998). Either could be back to win in 2012, only Romney has a chance in 2016.

I know there are other quantitative rules out there about elections. I’d love to hear about them from commenters.

*Updating Rauch’s article for the 2004 Presidential race, John Kerry was 20 years since his election to the Senate in 1984, Not Fresh, and a loser.

I’ll be out for the next month on vacation and won’t be back posting on the site again until the week of August 25. I’ll be back in time for the start of the new season and some things we have planned for it.

Robert will continue doing posts, including some of the regular ratings posts I have been doing, but not all of them. He’ll be sorting out exactly which ones over the next week or so.

In a couple of hours I’ll be taking a long walk over to BART (for those not familiar with the bay area, it stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit System or something close to that — it’s our subway) and doing something I rarely do — heading over to the ballpark in Oakland to see the Athletics take on the Twins of Minnesota.  As a San Francisco Giants season ticket holder, I do usually wind up seeing the Giants play the A’s during interleague, but it’s been a while since I took in a game in Oakland. 

If you ever get the chance to blow out of work and take in an afternoon baseball game during the middle of the week, I strongly recommend it.  It’ll make you feel young again.   

I was planning to think about our editorial strategy on the walk over to the subway, but then figured that since some of you are fairly outspoken, I’d just turn it over to you for your thoughts and think about other stuff on my walk. 

I can’t promise we’ll actually honor the requests because most times we’re completely at the mercy of the data that is available to us.  But it would be nice to know what you’d like to see in addition to what we’re already doing. 

 I know there is already interest in Daytime ratings (which I have been a complete slacker on), local ratings (which we have only limited access to), ratings for every airing of every cable show (we don’t have that kind of data access) and there’s a request for analysis on whether CW made a good move by getting rid of shows like Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars for the likes of Gossip Girl (I’ll hopefully get to that by the weekend).

With all that in mind, if there’s something you wish we’d write about with regard to the metrics of television either on a one-time or regular basis, please feel free to post your thoughts here or e-mail them to me at robert (at) tvbythenumbers dot com. Thanks!

I really am apolitical, and I didn’t watch last night’s democratic debate.  I did look at the overnight ratings data, and that I am sort of interested in mostly as a result of this web site.

But via Twitter I saw a comment from @Lons this morning trashing Charlie Gibson in a post titled, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know How Much Charlie Gibson Blows (I’m a sucker for a Bob Dylan lyric refernce, I suppose)  and then I saw this column from Washington Post television critic Tom Shales titled, In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC.

Said Shales:

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

I don’t know that Charlie Gibson didn’t blow, and I can’t say that specious gossip should be the stuff of news, but I can say this: from ABC’s own press release:

For the Wednesday 8-10 p.m. time period, this marks ABC’s best Total Viewing audience since 11/28/07, its largest Adult 18-49 rating since 2/27/08, and its best Adult 25-54 rating since 1/9/08.

Taking it all in, I was reminded of this column recently from Broadcasting and Cable’s Paige Albiniak titled Tim Robbins’ Beautiful, Impossible Media Dream.

It may be a gosh darn shame that specious gossip gets better ratings than hard news reporting, but that doesn’t change the fact that specious gossip gets better ratings than hard news reporting.

People sometimes just want to assume that human nature works the way they wish it did, rather than the way that it actually does.  This creates frustration that many people, myself included, struggle with.  But sometimes the struggle too, is just part of human nature…

I’m guessing that many of our readers play TVBigshot, TelevisionWithoutPity’s, TV mogul “stock market” game. If not, its definitely worth checking out.

For those of you who do, read on for some advice on your show buying and selling.

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