Live+7 DVR Ratings: 'Modern Family' Leads Adults 18-49 Ratings and Tops Viewership Gains; 'Parks and Recreation' Earns Biggest Percentage Gains in Week 10

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(30) Comments - Add Yours!

1. ih8tofly

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:16 AM

   Think anything becomes of this Neilsen Twitter TV Rating? I mean I Tweet while watching TV, but how will programmers capitalize? That’s what it’s all about, right?

   http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/press-room/2012/nielsen-and-twitter-establish-social-tv-rating.html

2. Californiadgd

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:20 AM

   Scandal did great.

3. robin

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:27 AM

   TVD 2.1 wow

4. Sarah

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:31 AM

   Yay Bones

   @Bill or Robert

   Do you any idea when the live+7 numbers will come out next week since Monday is Christmas Eve?

5. John A

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:31 AM

   Go Tvd. Decent by the rest of CW except for GG And Nikita which did kind of bad.

6. John A

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:33 AM

   Any Arrow Numbers?

7. Match

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:44 AM

   After all these years Grey’s Anatomy is number one drama.
   Great for Revenge the entire fall season hitting mid 3′s.

8. Tom

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:45 AM

   After reading Mr. Gorman’s updated article on PR Jedi Mind Tricks, I have to wonder why advertisers would be in the least interested in DVR numbers. That’s because I find it difficult to believe that viewers actually watch the commercials on the programs they DVR. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself, but I like to record all of my favorite television programming specifically so I can fast forward through all of the ads.

9. Robert Seidman

   Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:48 AM

   @Sarah: If I had to guess, I’d guess they come more or less on time next Monday, but it’s just a guess. Not a guess: past Monday that week is going to be screwed up -ie you won’t see finals, cable ratings for Sunday or Monday or any of the weekly stuff normally posted on Tuesday until later in the week, and I’d guess the DVR ratings that would have come on 12/31 will be delayed as well.

   @John A: Arrow 1.3 > 1.7 w/18-49 and 3.736M to 4.783M.

   @ih8: I think it becomes something Nielsen tries to sell since it can, and there is at least a small market for the info with at least a couple of other providers. But I don’t see it as any indication of which shows get cancelled/renewed any time soon (and I don’t see it mattering in those decisions five years from now either).

10. Sarah

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:53 AM

    @Robert

    Okay, thanks.

11. Robert Seidman

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:54 AM

    @Tom: the current deal struck is that advertisers will pay just for *commercial* viewing (whether live or on DVR) for up to 3 days after the program airs. Sadly, we almost never see any of the commercial data. Everything we post is program data which includes commercials. Commercials skipped or fast forwarded through are *not* counted in the commercial ratings and they are not counted above either. So in Nielsen-ese, if you watched 40 minutes of a 1 hour program skipping all the commercials and previously ons, you’d be counted as .66 of a viewer above, not as a full viewer. You wouldn’t count in the commercial ratings at all.

12. Oliver

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 10:56 AM

    @Tom

    I can imagine various uses for L+7 beyond C3.

    For example, if a show is heavily DVRed, it might be a sign it’s a tough/competitive timeslot and the network should move it.

    Another is product placement. You can be damn sure companies who pay for product placement care about L+7.

13. Tom

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 11:08 AM

    @ Robert Thanks for your response. I had no idea my VCR viewing habits could be tracked in such detail.

14. Bill Gorman

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 11:09 AM

    “After reading Mr. Gorman’s updated article on PR Jedi Mind Tricks, I have to wonder why advertisers would be in the least interested in DVR numbers. That’s because I find it difficult to believe that viewers actually watch the commercials on the programs they DVR. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself, but I like to record all of my favorite television programming specifically so I can fast forward through all of the ads.”

    To expand on Robert’s comment, *program* ratings (which are pretty much all we, or anybody else sees in public) are irrelevant to the price of ads and therefore the ad revenue of the networks, only the *commercial* ratings matter, so at least in some sense, program ratings as a whole don’t matter to advertisers.

    For our purposes, the fact that we rarely see commercial ratings doesn’t seem to be a handicap for our predictions, but I would love to see the season average C+3 day commercial ratings at the end of a season for all the scripted shows just to be able to run the same sort of analysis we do with the Live+Same Day ratings each week and see if there were any shows that turned out to be outliers.

15. Bill Gorman

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 11:11 AM

    “@ Robert Thanks for your response. I had no idea my VCR viewing habits could be tracked in such detail.”
    
    To be clear, unless you’re in a Nielsen family *your* viewing habits aren’t tracked at all.

    Robert’s explanation (and anything else having to do with ratings data gathering) applies only to Nielsen families.

16. pedalinginhummus

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 11:51 AM

    To Bill, Robert, and all those more Nielsen savvy than me,

    I did some quick research but couldn’t find anything concrete… does the Viewers/Viewership stats mean individual viewers watching the program in the United States? Or is this households watching the program?

    I would like to do a comparison between the 18-49 ratings and ratings that fall out of that demographic. In order to do so, I was hoping to put the total number of viewers into a percentage. So, would I divide Viewers/US Population? or Viewers/US households? maybe Viewers/US households with TVs?

    Let me know if I’m way off base here (or not being clear). I understand the viewership column has little to do with renew/cancel chances, I just wanted to try to draw some useful comparisons.

    Thanks!

17. Hadesa

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 11:53 AM

    Beauty and the Beast numbers anyone please?

18. Robert Seidman

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 12:03 PM

    @pedaling, probably a longer answer than you were hoping for, but:

    unless otherwise specified, all the ratings we post are only for the U.S. only

    the viewers = the total viewers age 2 and up (not just households, in most cases we do not post the household rating)

    ratings in general do not equal viewers, they are already a percent of the specific thing being measured so if a show has a 3.4 Adults 18-49 rating, that means on average, 3.4% of the U.S. adults 18-49 population in homes with TV was watching.

    an exact 1.0 adults 18-49 rating would be 1.265 million people. The ratings posted aren’t exact, they are rounded to the nearest tenth.

    If your goal is to figure out what the adults 18-49 rating means as a percentage of the whole population, that can be calculated but it would be misleading since there were people under 18 and over 50 who aren’t counted in the 18-49 rating who watched. So if your goal is to figure out what percentage of the U.S. population watched a particular show what you really want is the P2+ rating which isn’t posted anywhere that I know of.

    But, there are 289.42 million viewers age 2+ in TV homes in the US according to the Nielsen estimates. If you have the total viewership, you could divide it by 289.42 million to come up with the percentage.

19. Beth

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 12:24 PM

    @Robert

    How do you know if you have a Nielsen box?

20. Holly

    Posted December 17, 2012 at 12:27 PM

    @Beth,

    Because they call you, ask you if you want a box, and come install it. No one is being monitored without their knowledge and expressed consent.