Chelsea Handler's ratings topping Conan

Exactly. She could be a huge hit and the affiliates would still be screwed.

 

Unfortunately for Conan, his fans don't watch TV.

 

I remember reading somewhere that his DVR/Tivo numbers are through the roof. That's how I watch him.

 

Those viewers are counted in the ratings, as long as they watch within a few hours of the original airing.

 

Actually, PC, it's a three-day rule for DVR and VOD ratings. Live plus 72 hours count, at least in the ratings that determine advertising rates, which are the ones that really matter.

 

I'm actually surprised by that. If I'm an advertiser, I don't care how high someone's DVR ratings are, only the live ratings. I wouldn't want to spend money to have people fast forward through my advertisement.

 

That makes sense. The numbers I see regularly are the overnights, with obviously a much shorter window for the delayed viewing.

 

They can differentiate the numbers. You can look at live or live + DVR numbers.

In fact, I just checked my daily overnights email. I get four different spreadsheets for our market -- broadcast, cable, live + 3, and live + 7. Within those spreadsheets I can break it down into any possible demo. And that's just the info the corporate research guy deems worthwhile to send out to everyone; he gets more detail than we do.

 

I know they CAN do that, I'm just surprised advertisers would give ANY consideration to DVR numbers because there's almost no chance a DVR viewer is going to actually watch the advertisements. If I'm an advertiser, a show could pull a 20 rating on DVR and a 2.5 live and I'd rather spend my money on a show that does a 2.0 on DVR and 6 rating live.

 

Some will, some won't. In reality, a hell of a lot of people don't fast-forward through the commercials. I don't know why, but they don't. And ad placement becomes more important, since someone who does fast-forward will likely see at least part of the first commercial in the break.

But bottom line, they break the numbers down a million ways and it's up to the advertiser to decide which ones are important to them.

The breakdown isn't strictly for the advertisers -- it also helps the station understand viewership patterns. My newscast's lead-in is a show that has a huge DVR following; if you look at the "Live plus" number it looks like I lose a huge part of the audience, but looking at strictly a live number I actually retain a good percentage.

 

A few years ago I was that corporate research guy. Or girl. Really, lady. Anyway, I sent the ratings to ad buyers all the time, and I made damn sure to use the live + 3 or live +7 numbers whenever it made sense. Not so much for sports, news or syndication, but definitely for prime. I worked for Fox affiliates, so I generally only had 10p newscasts to deal with, and few people DVR'd those. At least that was the case two years ago.

Buyers are oftentimes lazy, underpaid, angry people dealing with a number of stations and asshole advertisers. Some buyers would call me on the DVR numbers, but most wouldn't. Ratings tell so many "stories" that even if we got rebuffed on the DVR ratings, we could oftentimes find another reason to ask for the money. It was a lot of bullshit, but you could get pretty damn creative sometimes.

 

Exactly. There are 5 stations doing news in my city, and after a ratings period ends, all five will claim to be number one -- with numbers to back it up.

The newspaper and NBC affililiate are both owned by Gannett. The station was number one for years, based on Monday thru Friday numbers. When we beat them in a book, the paper announced NBC was still number one -- and based it on Monday thru Sunday numbers, which absolutely nobody cares about.