Fringe – not dead yet
by Doc on Feb.21, 2011, under Television
Despite being moved into the Friday night “death slot”, Fringe seems to refuse to lay for its fate. Seems that despite two consecutive drops, the J.J. Abrams-led sci-fi series on Fox saw a 7% gain this past Friday, getting a 1.4/5 rating. So perhaps the “death slot” is highly overrated, or perhaps antiquated?
February 23rd, 2011 on 10:09 am
They’ve got to come up with a way to measure the viewers of a show that DVR it.
February 23rd, 2011 on 2:02 pm
They actually do. Nielsen produces several different ratings. The ones typically looked at are “Live” (as the name implies, the standard live viewer ratings, although I believe there is some short delay wiggle room), “Live plus 1” is Live plus those who watch within the next day, and “Live plus 7” is Live plus those who watch within the next week.
But it is really all in what the advertisers are going to pay for. “Live” is far more valuable than either of the other two, because by having the program recorded, there is the implicit ability to skip over the advertisements. Advertisers aren’t going to want to pay for advertising space that can be skipped. There may be ways of determining how many ads were skipped, but they aren’t in use now.
It doesn’t matter if you get 5 million viewers in the Live+7 rating, but only 1 million Live. Advertisers aren’t going to pay for 5 million viewers. The number is likely to be a lot closer to 1 million.
The whole TV industry is still trying to figure out the future of the industry given the rapid acceleration of related technologies.
See this article I wrote last month, along with the linked article:
http://scifistorm.org/2011/01/20/tv-ratings-vs-sf-the-reality/