Short version...One problem with using the rankings as people have when it comes to T.O. bashing is they aren't noting the following:
- that it's a ranking of almost 14,400 shows!
- that kids' programming does extremely well. Almost half of the top 100 are kids shows. 52 airings of SpongeBob did better than Real Housewives of Atlanta in terms of viewers. SpongeBob > NeNe! And iCarly's iFight Shelby Marx was the most dominant show on all of cable with 7.87 million viewers. Kids shows dominate in the rankings.
- some reruns and old shows just do very, very well. A repeat of NCIS beat the season finales and original episodes of In Plain Sight, and Law & Order Criminal intent. In terms of total viewers it did better than Jon & Kate Plus Eight and Red Sox vs. Yankees, the season premiere of Psych, TNT's Leverage and Hawthorne, Dark Blue and Saving Grace and Lifetime's Army Wives. But you can't judge the Army Wives numbers as bad simply because 8 repeat airings of SpongeBob bested it. That's just life in the cable rankings. Ultimately you have to compare shows to how they perform on the networks they air on. On that basis, The T.O. Show was the third-most watched show on VH1 last week.
- Reality shows like The T.O. Show are relatively very inexpensive compared to scripted dramas
Long version...
Terrell Owens linked to the post on his show's ratings from his Twitter account, and a post I didn't expect many people to read wound up being the most-read post of the day. Had I known anyone was actually going to read it, I would've tried to do a better job writing it.
In the interim some folks have e-mailed to explain to me the nature of some of the criticism of the numbers for VH1's The T.O. Show.
Apparently the ribbing begins with the "rankings" and people throwing out numbers like it ranked number 798th. I don't know what it has ranked in previous week's but I'm looking at the same stats some of the chuckleheads in the media are citing. Last week (for the 8/3 episode) it ranked 469th in an obscure ranking called P2+ coverage ratings. Purely based on viewers it actually ranked 498th, and that 497 shows came in ahead of The T.O. Show seems to be the cause for the abuse.
But that's nuts. Those rankings rank every show on cable that ran for the week and not just in prime-time but for the whole day. There were almost 14,400 programs ranked. 14,400!
Apparently they used that a Fresh Prince rerun ranked 366th (actually 444th based on viewers, there are wacky, and meaningless ties with the ratings game sometimes). But that a Fresh Prince rerun at Nick at Night did better than The TO Show really speaks more to some mind-boggling things that happen in the ratings -- and just how good some old shows do. The Fresh Prince numbers are a bit mind-boggling because it ran on Nick at Night on a Tuesday Morning at 4:30am, when only 8% of the people in the USA were watching TV. We see that kind of thing happen, and I've spent the better part of the last year celebrating Raven Symone' because years old reruns of that are notoriously well-performing.
A That's So Raven rerun at 11:30pm last Friday ranked 195 by rating (226th by viewers) besting even Will Smith with 2.546 million viewers. But when T.O has 1.834 million for his VH1 reality show, I don't view it as a comparative failure. I just view the results for That's So Raven as amazing.
Still, I have partaken in the same sort of bashing about how reruns beat so many shows. But usually I reserve it for things like when That's So Raven beats a critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated show like Damages by almost 300%. That's So Raven beating an inexpensive reality show? That's a weekly, if not daily occurrence! A new episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta beat Raven, but not by that much, really with 2.7 million. That's So Raven outperformed EVERY airing of the Daily Show, Top Chef Masters (T.O. beat Top Chef Masters, by the way). Raven beat the best airing of Shark Week - Sharkbite Summer (1.843 million, a mere 7,000 more viewers than T.O's 1.836 million).
If you want to compare T.O. to iCarly, SpongeBob, the Burn Notice finale and NCIS reruns (and That's So Raven and Fresh Prince reruns too), sure, his numbers weren't that good. But then again, by those comparisons neither were roughtly 14,000 out of the 14,378 programs that aired last week.
Those bashers are ridiculous. If they even followed VH1 and their shows over the past 3 years they would know that a show like the T.O. Show is not one of their marquee shows. It’s a show to branch out and break away from the monotony of their marquee reality shows. That’s a difference that most people fail to realize.
One of VH1′s marquee shows can get the ratings this show gets and while it’s not good and nowhere near it’s highs from 2006 and 2007, it’s not completely a failure because they still manage to post strong finishes. A show like this is actually doing very well for the type of reality show that it is on VH1 and if it manages to stay where it is or increase it’s viewership for the remainder of this season then all signs point to it being a second season if you compare it to the ratings of similar shows like this that have aired on VH1. But hey, what do I know. People just like to spin data so they can appear to be correct even if they aren’t.
umm…there’s no way odd hour reruns of raven and fresh prince are doing are as well as reported here. I’m convinced that given nielsons small sample size, that shows with under 2 million viewers just aren’t accurately represented in the ratings.(what is that like 10 households?) Off hour reruns of family/kids shows shouldn’t be beating first-run primetime programming. The sample size isn’t large enough to get accurate readings on shows that small.
No need to bring Damages into this!
Sorry, Dave, you’re wrong. Though everything can be explained by such thinking! Think of it this way — if Nielsen’s sample was so flawed for shows under 2 million viewers, 97% of the programs that air on cable would be impacted and not able to sell national adds. In round numbers, last week 14,000 out of 14,400 shows had less than 2 million.
In the case of Raven/Fresh Prince it’s much more than 10 households in the national panel that project out to the ~2 million. Though I definitely doubt that the sampling is perfect, I don’t think it’s wildly off for measuring shows under 2 million viewers. Again, given that 97% of shows on basic cable do less than 2 million, we would be reading all the time about advertisers bitching about it and we’d be seeing a lot more network execs of shows that have 800,000 viewers speaking up about the flaws.
Also looking at the numbers for the shows that come on before the Fresh Prince and Raven reruns — the numbers are lower, and go back down for the shows that air next, and consistently so. So even if the measurement is flawed, those shows are drawing viewers. It is mind-boggling, and it defies conventional wisdom, but I can’t chalk that up to flaws in Nielsen measurement, at least not completely. Nielsen does have minimum thresholds for measurement but those levels are on a per network basis (for a variety of reasons, including coverage) and I have never seen what those levels are by network. I know on CNBC in 2008 it was 122,000.
I hear people meters for the national panel have expanded to somewhere between 15,000-20,000, based on the universe estimates of 114.5 million homes, that means one household = around 6,500 homes, and Nielsen’s panel is set up to mirror the unverse estimate that would put ~2.5 people per household. I don’t have enough data to calculate viewers/household/show for all of the cable shows, but assuming it was 1 viewer per household for a show with 2 million viewers that would be about 300 homes. Even if I’m wrong by 2X, your estimate of 10 households is still off by more than an order of magnitude.
Again the viewings are most likely going to drop dramatically after some more episodes and the only reason people are watching it is because of T.O.s fame. Also most other shows on VH1 aren’t talked about at all compared to one starring T.O. Also the show probably wouldnt get good reviews as it is pointless. It will not last more than one season and will crumbloe just as the Williams sisters show did.
Again, the numbers I cited in the other post were NOT FOR THE PREMIERE, but for the third Episode.
Clearly people are watching these shows, and obviously a significant number of neilson homes are watching which means a significant number of people are watching, but significant doesn’t always mean accurate. For shows with 25 million viewers basic statistics tells us a sample size of 20,000(50,000 viewers) can give us an accurate reading with an acceptably tiny margin of error. As soon as the number of viewers gets smaller that margin of error gets larger. All I’m saying is that when the numbers get really small, like they do for most of basic cable, who’s to say that a show with 1.8 million is really smaller than a show with 2.0 million.(+/- 200,000 viewers is a lot more significant here than with the 25 million viewer show) Of course those numbers are still significant enough to sell advertising with but as relative comparative rankings I’m not convinced.