Our friend Brian Stelter makes the front page of today's New York Times with a thoughtful examination on how the Internet "water cooler effect" is friend to TV, rather than foe:
There are other factors contributing to the ratings spikes: attention-grabbing shows (the Super Bowl featured the New Orleans Saints, a popular underdog), gradual population growth and an economic contraction that some analysts say is leading to more people spending more time at home in front of their TV and computer screens.
Along with those reasons, “increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings,” said Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen. He said the Olympic data showing simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience.
Woo-hoo, look at that double-digit simultaneous usage for big events!
Particularly with big live events, I'd even take a sip of the kool-aid myself, but just as with the bit about ratings being driven in part by economic conditions there isn't any real data to back it up. It's fairly easy for Nielsen to report that 14 percent of the people who watched the Super Bowl or nearly 13 percent of people watching the opening ceremonies of the winter the Olympics also wound up going online.
Any hard core fantasy league player always goes online during sporting events for their leagues! But what does that mean in terms of increased ratings? We can't be sure it means anything.
Same for social media buzz in most cases. It might be great for the Super Bowl, Golden Globes and the Grammy Awards, but we can't really know that for sure because there's no data that directly correlates that buzz to ratings.
Big events are big events and going to have big ratings anyway. Long before Twitter or Facebook, the Super Bowl didn't exactly have a ratings problem. Moreover, what does it mean for The Good Wife?
What Does Social Media Mean For The TV Ratings of most shows?
We don't really know. No data. For all we know, it's bad for ratings. "Yeah, I meant to watch 30 Rock, but I got distracted by FarmVille on Facebook."
The thing with any of the buzz indicators is they don't typically show progression over time in any useful way. Were the social media buzz indicators for Heroes higher this year than last? Probably. Because more people were using social media this year than last! How to explain the steep ratings drops for Heroes ratings this year then? Of course, they are easily explained by fewer people watching.
Same for Grey's Anatomy, which has quite a bit of social media buzz and even a Shonda Rhimes who is pretty active on Twitter.
The Super Bowl, the Olympics and awards shows are things that usually have relatively strong ratings anyway. Unfortunately for the TV networks there are far fewer events like that than what's on TV the other 99% of the time.
There's no denying that social media is a big deal. But how big of a deal is it for television?
We still don't know.
I’d say there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it does NOT drive the ratings than there being evidence to support that it does.
Honestly, I watched cause I love the Who. They were a lot better choice than those stupid 10 artist medleys they’ve had in recent years.
It would be interesting to get some real data particularly for the cable channels. USA & Bravo seem to do a lot on-line stuff related to their shows. Also I’ve noticed TNT promoting a web tie-in to Leverage.
I guess I have a problem with the word “drive” which implies that one factor is the predominant cause of whatever trend you’re talking about.
And I really dislike that Nielsen quote, which is part of a long tradition of Nielsen reps saying whatever reinforces the reporter’s premise in the hope of getting their name in the paper. How can anybody from Nielsen say so conclusively that social media is “definitely driving” ratings. That’s just hype and it’s kind of irresponsible coming from what should be an objective source of research.
AND…that 14% simultaneous use statistic is misleading because it captures people who were using both media at any point during the game and for any duration. The average simultaneous use during the Super Bowl was 29 minutes. Well, the Super Bowl is over three hours long. So while 14% were on both media simultaneously at some point, the number on both at any given moment is more like 2-3%.
But having said all of that, I appreciate the NYT finally acknowledging that the internet is not killing television. And I do think there’s a dynamic in which online conversation can amplify a viewer’s interest in a show or event. Overall I thought this was a good story, marred somewhat by the typical overeagerness to identify anything happening online as significant and industry-changing.
More TVs hopping onto the Internet
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10458846-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
“Almost 42 percent of the sets that were purchased in January and are now connected to the Internet are Internet-Enabled TVs (IETVs), which can jump online using their own built-in wired or wireless capabilities.”
I do believe that more and more social networking is driving TV/Computer hookups in my opion. My 70 year old in-laws are now becoming connected as a result of social networking! (and do you forget how much you take your computer knowledge for granted until have to support them!)
Yeah, well, looked how well all that internet attention/talk/buzz worked for Snakes on a Plane.
Sometimes I think these articles are written because their boss tells them they need to hand something in – so they are forced to make up a conversation or topic that isn’t realistic.
Look, as this site can attest to, money talks. Ad money. Advertisers aren’t going to pay to have their commercial aired on TV for a show that supposedly does well online. How does that make sense to them?
And even if they moved that money to advertise during the streaming of the show, they don’t even pay a majority of what they would for TV. Why? Because a show getting “a lot” of viewership online is still a speck of the number of eyes on TV. It’s like saying she’s the hottest chick at ugly camp.
Dollars and sense, it doesn’t make add up.
*it doesn’t add up
That Jon Gibs quote is weird. Just because time spent online doesn’t distract from TV viewing (because it happens simultaneously) doesn’t mean that it drives it.
But more importantly: People who point out that we’re all using several media simultaneously tend to draw the conclusion that TV is not in trouble. I don’t think it’s that easy.
Ad buyers may pay by the ratings point, but what they buy is our attention. Can’t really measure that, so they use ratings points as a proxy for consumer attention.
If a ratings point loses its worth in terms of consumer attention (because we pay attention elsewhere while being counted toward ratings points), that will eventually show in ad-effect studies. And then the exact same ratings point will be worth less money.
Sometimes people write about this simultaneous use of media as if it’s a new phenomenon. It isn’t. What’s new is our ability to quantify it.
People have been reading and watching TV simultaneously for decades, we just haven’t been able to measure it. I tend to doubt that the % of the TV audience that is simultaneously online is all that different from the percentage that was simultaneously reading the newspaper 30 years ago.
Bravo Mikey. I see all sorts of Buzz about Dollhouse, Heroes, even Chuck yet I don’t see it translated into ratings and honestly I don’t see a lot of discussion about shows like Greys or DH which in theory are younger skewed shows. And I hate the BUZZ word.
Economic downturn rationale is a better bet than social media synergy.
I agree there is almost no data for the synergy argument – but we do have vast stats on unemployment and the huge decline in employed-to-population figures.
The tie-in to increased TV viewing is missing (so far) but if you aren’t at work, you’re probably at home and if you’re at home, you’re probably…on the internet, watching TV, or sleeping.
I think this chain of causality is less tortuous than assuming a mysterious year-over-year surge in Facebook-posting, couch-potato hyper-multitaskers…
Media hucksters (networks, cablers, etc) *wish* people were hyper-multitasking (we can sell two ads where we used to just sell one!) but their evidence (as usual) seems more cobbled together than empirically supported.
Speaking of social media – Conan O’Brien just got a twitter account – guess we know where his next show is *g*
Kermonk, please check the new post list before posting comments. Old news! (well, 15 minutes old, anyway!)
A large social media following doesn’t necessarily translate into ratings. Jimmy Fallon has over 2MM Twitter followers, and his ratings are consistently low.