SCC Blog

Ratings Spotlight

A lot has been made in sports and entertainment circles about ratings of late.  Why?  Well, a number of factors have contributed, capped off by a few historic events that managed to capture the nation’s attention over the holidays.

Before delving into specifics, let us first address the concept of ratings.  Many automatically associate the term “tv ratings” with Nielsen.  This is understandable given Nielsen Media Research’s evolution as an American brand name, much like kleenex, band-aid, q-tip or scotch tape.  Nielsen has established its service as the industry expert when measuring the number of people watching television shows and makes its data available to the television and cable networks, advertisers and the media.

The following excerpt from the “how stuff works” website provides a great breakdown on how ratings are consequently measured:

To find out who is watching TV and what they are watching, the company gets around 5,000 households to agree to be a part of the representative sample for the national ratings estimates. Nielsen’s statistics show that 99 million households have TVs in the United States, so Nielsen’s sample is not very large. The key, therefore, is to be sure the sample is representative. Then TVs, homes, programs, and people are measured in a variety of ways.

To find out what people are watching, meters installed in the selected sample of homes track when TV sets are on and what channels they are tuned to. A “black box,” which is just a computer and modem, gathers and sends all this information to the company’s central computer every night. Then by monitoring what is on TV at any given time, the company is able to keep track of how many people watch which program.

Small boxes, placed near the TV sets of those in the national sample, measure who is watching by giving each member of the household a button to turn on and off to show when he or she begins and ends viewing. This information is also collected each night.

The national TV ratings largely rely on these meters. To ensure reasonably accurate results, the company uses audits and quality checks and regularly compares the ratings it gets from different samples and measurement methods.

Now that we have a better handle on exactly how ratings are derived, let’s take a look at a couple recent programs that garnered significant television ratings:

NFL Football - New England Patriots vs. New York Giants

In a game originally slated to be aired ONLY on the NFL Network, the Patriots secured a “perfect” season by beating the Giants on national television to finish the regular season with a 16-0 record.  An average of 34.5 million viewers tuned in, the largest audience for an NFL non-playoff game in more than 12 years.  The 34.5 million viewers were the most since 35.7 million viewers watched the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day in 1995.

The game received a 24.0 rating and a 40 share in New York and a huge 50.1/75 in Boston.

AMP Energy NHL Winter Classic

For the first time in a long time, the NHL enjoyed some ratings success.  The AMP Energy NHL Winter Classic, broadcast New Year’s Day on NBC, earned a 2.6 overnight rating, the highest NHL regular season rating in more than ten years. Viewers tuned in to witness the Pittsburgh Penguins defeat the Buffalo Sabres 2-1 in the first U.S. outdoor game in NHL history. The NHL’s poster boy Sidney Crosby, (the league’s reigning MVP), scored the game-winning goal in a shootout.  Not surprisingly, Buffalo (38.2/58) and Pittsburgh (17.7/30) represented the two highest metered markets.

Ratings were clearly important to ESPN on New Year’s Eve as they did their part to capture a significant television audience amidst the flurry of New Year’s Eve specials.  For those who missed it, daredevil Robbie Maddison’s jumped a football field on his motorcycle.  ESPN provided live coverage of the event.

This is typically an important time for networks with sports coverage as the NFL playoffs heat up and college football bowl season winds down.  I am sure we’ll have more to report on that in the coming weeks. 

*** Questions for Classroom Discussion ***

1) What do we mean by the term “ratings”?

2) Why are ratings important to a network? 

3) Why are ratings important to advertisers?

4) What factors influence tv ratings?

5) What can a network do to manage those factors?

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