The State of the Fandom

[tzikeh]

TiVo is listing their Top 100 Season Passes, taken by sampling 20,000 anonymous users.

basingstoke said, "Of course, TiVo is a little skewed since you have to be kind of seriously into tv to get it in the first place". But that just plays into my belief that TiVo is the advance guard when it comes to stats on viewership. Nielsen ratings are hopelessly outdated. This points towards a very near future in which network, basic cable, and pay cable are competing for viewers on a completely level playing field.

You know, it's funny. What happened with tanning has happened with fandom. Stick with me on this one. ;) Back in the day, paler skin was the most desirable skin, because it indicated wealth and status. The more money you had, the less likely you were going to be out in the sun (laboring) for any real period of time. Then, that changed to darker skin - because the more money you had, the more time you had to lie around in the sun while others did work (indoors) for you. With media fandom, up to just a very very few years ago, if you were a hardcore fan, you knew the television schedules by heart - what was on which network when. What was opposite what. You could recite the grids. Nowadays, a hardcore media fan has no idea when *anything* is on, because it's all on the TiVo Season Pass and you never, ever have to think about what day or time it airs - or you're downloading everything from Suprnova.org.

Progress! It's always interesting.

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

What happened with tanning has happened with fandom.

How totally fascinating. I hadn't thought about it in that way, but I think you're right! I do forget when things air, now, because I just watch them on TiVo. (Just like I don't know anyone's new phone numbers, because my Palm and my cellphone remember them for me. I can usually still remember people's old ones, though, from before I had gadgets to track them for me...)

[yahtzee63.livejournal.com]

Actually, these TiVo ratings are not dramatically different than the Nielsens -- a little less baseball (which would skew heavily toward live viewers, not all of whom use the TiVo-through-ads approach), and some things in different order, and a better showing for "Scrubs" -- but is this that much of a change?

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is a big change, actually - shows which hardly register on Nielsen (Nip/Tuck, Sopranos, Rescue Me, Six Feet Under, Daily Show) are ranked with things like CSI, Law and Order, American Idol, etc. You hear about how those cable shows have big Nielsen ratings *for cable*, but this points to a much much larger audience than standardized ratings report - where they should be big Nielsen ratings, period. An example - Nielsen gives the average showing of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy around 1.6 million viewers. But here, it's ranked above American Idol, which Nielsen gives 25 million viewers.

[yahtzee63.livejournal.com]

You're right that the Top 100 is a lot different than the Nielsen Top 100 -- I was looking more at the top 25, which is not very different.

But I'm still not sure it correllates exactly. "American Idol," for instance, is a show that most people want to watch live, for the competition/voting aspect; therefore it's probably not TiVoed as much, I'd say.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Okay, then let's stick entirely with non-cable, non-voting shows. ;)

Scrubs, according to Nielsen, gets 3 million (on average) viewers, compared with Everybody Loves Raymond - 12 million. Crossing Jordan - 12 million on average, while Smallville gets 2 million viewers on the Nielsen system.

Take a look at Scrubs and Smallville compared to Everybody Loves Raymond and Crossing Jordan on the TiVo listings. I think the discrepancy is significant.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to me that cable shows would rank comparably to broadcast shows on the Tivo ratings. Very few people would bother to get a Tivo unless they had either cable or satellite.

I do know a few Luddites who don't have access to anything but broadcast. I wonder what percentage they are of the overall viewing public.

[jfc013.livejournal.com]

Guess that makes me a half-assed fan, then, since I don't have a TiVo (probably because there's videotapes I've recorded from TV over ten years ago that I still have to watch once), and I never download whole episodes of anything...