mcd1400de wrote:silverscreenselect wrote:Ratings for 24 were down about one-third from the last Sunday premiere two years ago. However, that show did not go up against the Golden Globe Awards as this year's show did. However, viewership remained constant throughout the entire two hours, indicating that people who watched the show stayed with it, which bodes well for its longterm prospects. Serialized shows that lose viewership from the start have a tough time getting it back.
Do those ratings include people who TiVoed the show but didn't watch live? I would also speculate that there are a lot more people with DVRs today than there were two years ago, and that 24 is a prime candidate for time-shifting.
Next day ratings are based on what they call fast nationals, which includes people who watch a show live and those who record it and watch it by 3:00am the next day. Nielsen has been using fast national ratings for two years now, so the figures for 24 indicate that about 31% fewer adults 18-49 (and about 25% fewer total people) watched the same day this year as two years ago.
Networks and advertisers also keep track of seven-day ratings, which is the number of people who watch a show live or within seven days of its initial broadcast. That's a lot less scientific and is based on survey responses to questions about recording and watching the show within seven days. Based on that, they try to estimate what percentage of viewers for a particular show will watch between 1 and 7 days later. So if their figures indicate that 10% of the audience for 24 watches it later and the fast nationals were 10 million viewers, then the final estimate will be 11 million viewers.
These DVR percentages vary from show to show. Certain shows such as sporting events and election results tend to have relatively low DVR percentages, while others like Lost, 24, and Heroes have much higher percentages. They use seven days as a cutoff on the theory that viewing later than that will be "stale" for advertising purposes. It's a compromise between the networks who would like to count every viewer who ever watches the show for advertising purposes, and advertisers who don't want to count any of them (because they know most people skip ads when they DVR a show).
