We'll never know!
A bit of translation: 580,000 people started watching the premiere of LOST on ABC.com, whether they watched for 30 seconds, a minute or the whole episode -- we don't know, and because they don't want you to be able to compute engagement they also do not include "average time viewed per stream" metrics. Unfortunately that's really the only way to begin comparing it to the viewing on TV Tuesday night. The 12.1 million average TV viewers means there was over 725 million minutes of engagement (12.1 million times 60 minute duration as measured for TV). Many more than 12.1 million watched at least part of the episode.
The 1.17 million full episode starts were for any of the LOST episodes available (last year's finale, etc) and not just the premiere. But it looks like these numbers do not factor in Hulu (the episode is available on Hulu now , but I'm not sure if it was on Wednesday) and are only for ABC.com.
via ABC:
ABC.COM USERS GET “LOST “, TALLYING MORE THAN 580,000 EPISODE STARTS OF LOST’S SEASON 6 PREMIERE ON WEDNESDAY
NETWORK SITE GARNERS DOUBLE-DIGIT, YEAR-OVER-YEAR GAINS IN UNIQUES & PAGE VIEWS
Following last Tuesday’s successful premiere on ABC where it ranked as the night’s No. 1 scripted TV show and was watched by over 12.1 million viewers, “Lost” drove record online viewing at ABC.com on Wednesday, with more than 580,000 episode starts of the final season’s premiere on the site, an increase of more than 34% over last season’s “Lost” premiere, according to internal data. Overall, Wednesday marked ABC.com’s highest full episode viewing this season with more than 1.17 million total full episode starts.
On Tuesday, leading up to the “Lost” Season 6 opener, ABC.com saw more than 1.8 million unique visitors and delivered over 7.4 million page views, a 15% and 43% increase, respectively over the previous year’s premiere date, based on data from Omniture.
Additionally, visitors to ABC.com logged more than 2.2 million video views of “Lost”-related short-form content on Tuesday, an increase of over 32% compared to last season.
Consistently one of the most-viewed series on ABC.com’s full-episode player, “Lost” continues to connect with fans across the web. This season, ABC.com offers highly-interactive, community-driven features including user-created Top 5 lists which allow fans to arrange, rank and share their personalized lists of show-related favorites; and Episode Commentary where fans can not only access commentaries created by series’ insiders, but also create and share their own commentaries for each episode. Additionally, the site will soon unveil a Fan Art Wall, an interactive area for fans to upload, view and rate “Lost”-themed art created by fellow fans, and also give fans the opportunity to participate in the Ultimate “Lost” Fan Promo Contest, providing users a “mash-up” tool to create and share their own “Lost” promos with a winning promo to be featured on-air.
“Lost” airs regularly Tuesdays (9:00-10:00 p.m., ET) on ABC. The series’ finale is set to air as a primetime event on a special night on Sunday, May 23 from 9:00-11:00 p.m., ET. Preceding the finale will be a recap special from 8:00-9:00 p.m., ET.
About ABC.com
As the online home of the ABC Television Network, ABC.com is dedicated to providing users with innovative ways to experience their favorite shows. In addition to the Emmy & Webby Award-winning ABC Full Episode Player, the site also offers the viewers of ABC’s hit series everything from games, blogs, community forums, photos and downloadables to new ABC Music Lounge and the ABC Store which provides fans access to a wide variety of unique ABC-related merchandise. ABC.com is available anytime, anywhere on mobile devices at m.abc.com.
Just W-O-W!
From the looks of it, that 580,000 is total, not unique, so it includes all the obessive fans who watched 12 times so they could catch every detail.
But in fairness all tv stats are fuzzy at best. 20 million might have ncis on each week but how many are really paying attention vs have it on in the background and barely paying attention? We’ll never know.
vetinari, though I agree in general, I don’t agree in terms of these comparisons. Sure, you don’t know how many people actually were paying attention to NCIS, but when you compare it to HOUSE where you don’t know that either, the comparisons are apples-to-apples because they are measured the same.
THESE numbers are not measured the same way.
Holly says:
“From the looks of it, that 580,000 is total, not unique, so it includes all the obessive fans who watched 12 times so they could catch every detail.”
In that case, it would also include people such as myself who tried three different browsers before realizing that abc.com just wasn’t going to successfully deliver a watchable stream.
@Boris,
Yes, it would, which given my experience with the abc.com player, would make up a significant portion of the numbers.
Boris, holly, you should really just use the Hulu player. It’s better. (meaning it works on a mostly consistent basis, and doesn’t take forever to buffer.)
Oh, I usually do, this is from last year before ABC went on hulu.
I wonder what it is going to happen when pirating becomes so prevalent that it destroys online viewing entirely? Or will it destroy online viewing?
I’m not an advocate of piracy (unless it involves Johnny Depp or an eye patch), but I do know that it is already relatively simple to do. Of course, relatively simple still means that the vast majority of people online today still do not know how to do it. But what happens when it becomes a one or two click option that even my grandmother could take advantage of? My dead grandmother!
It seems as if digital protection is mostly a joke, as my research shows that nothing is currently protected enough to keep it from being ripped, and that has been the case throughout every step of this. Each time copy protection gets changed or strengthened, the rippers figure out ways around it almost instantly. Unless something changes dramatically when it comes to copy protection software, I can’t see that ever solving the problem.
So, what happens? I see a television crash similar to the dotcom crash coming. Eventually, ad dollars are going to dry up, because eventually ad buyers are going to realize that they are essentially spending billions of dollars on nothing. Then what?
All this has been going through my head ever since you posted the story about the increase in commercials that are coming to online viewing. Seems all that will really do is help studios make it through the short term, because long term all it seems to me that it will do is drive people to what is becoming an exponentially easier option: piracy.
Schmoker: I think the general idea is that if you make the media easy to access you can make money with the mainstream consumer (see iTunes/Amazon). Ad money isn’t everything. With 90% of Americans already paying for cable, video consumers are clearly much more accustomed to a subscription model than music consumers were in the napster era.
You are likely right, Lurker, but it will be interesting to see if they get there through foresight or desperation. I would have thought we’d have seen this model start to be used already if there were much forethought out there. It just seems to me like most of these companies are more interested in trying to keep the cooling corpse of the old model going as long as possible.
That’s not new in business, by the way. History is replete with examples of the big boys ignoring new tech or new ideas or new models to their overwhelming detriment and ultimate destruction.
It seems like Comcast sees the revolution coming, hence the NBCU move, but I don’t see a lot of others preparing themselves for much more than the short term solutions that will nearly be obsolete by the time they are fully implemented (which is how I view Disney moving all their prime sports properties to ESPN).
This girl Holly seems pretty full of herself.
Schmoker: I don’t think sports are particularly prone to piracy, anyway. I think that’s part of the reason that the affiliates are peeved. History also has a nasty habit of crushing innovators. Unfortunately, I think you are right–the next step is probably going to be fully integrated development and distribution chains similar to the Comcast/NBCU deal.
Lurker: Depends on the sport. Boxing, pro wrestling, cage fighting, and “mixed martial arts” get pirated with extreme regularity. Motorsports does somewhat – particularly European F1 stuff; cricket and international soccer/footie rather less, American football now and then (things like the Super Bowl being an exception), NHL games rarely and baseball or basketball almost never, except for championships. Every once in a blue moon someone will pirate a darts championship or a poker tournament or some other dubious sport that nobody really cares about, as well…
While getting accurate unique viewers is a challenge, I see it as more capable of developing into a proper system that actually could be more accurate than TV ratings. There are already some companies putting together pretty good systems, considering this amount of massive online media has all been a pretty quick evolution. The hard part of measurement is the problem of multiple viewers from same IPs, some homes don’t have static IPs, and cookies are not a very reliable source. However, with all those problems ahead, I think its still problems that could be reliable fixed with technological advances in coding. Oh yeah, and with the comcast deal pretty much a done thing—they now have access to the online media market to count numbers from both sides.
Roland, be clear that every network knows already to the nth degree how many streams are viewed, how many minutes/seconds each stream averaged, and what the total engagement is for all authorized online streaming of their content. There are challenges with direct measurement vs. panel-based measurement (age, gender, income, etc) but those challenges can be overcome. With or without Comcast though, NBC can already count both sides.
With web servers, who owns the pipes to get to the server don’t matter. The server still records…a lot of stuff!
Absolutely. What they don’t know is as I was mostly referring to is unique audience. Comcast is more likely than fox or abc to have additional data to qualify their data. They have tons of subscribers who now they have their data from the isp side.
Roland, in the sense that Comcast has your billing address and other billing information they can map that against other databases and that does give Comcast access to more data than ABC.com. However, when it comes to actual Internet usage that information doesn’t help them calculate unique usage.
I agree mostly with what you say. Where I differ with you in how that billing information combined with the internet usage and online tv. They essentially have demographic information about age, gender, household incomes, etc of their subscribers and can use that for a higher premium in online advertising.
I don’t see that as really being an advantage since at the aggregate level the abc.com, etc. could buy the geographic data profiling and map it to IP addresses, or subscribe to services that do. It’s a similar method to the way Quantcast tries to figure out demographics for our site:
http://www.quantcast.com/tvbythenumbers.com#demographics
Granted, one major traffic spike from a site can really skew our demographics, which are reported only monthly. But we also aren’t paying anything for the processing. The same databases could be (and are) used for more real-time accounting/demographics information.
Also, it seems we’re on a track where the Nielsen C3 measurement to include online viewing beginning next year (entirely panel based) is going to be the only meaningful currency for ads in online video of TV shows (at least on a % revenue basis).