https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2018/03/30/new-way-to-track-tv-viewership-vaults-redspast-top.html
By Steve Watkins Staff Reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier
Fox Sports has been focusing on a new way to look at Major League Baseball TV ratings that would push Cincinnati Reds games’ viewership far beyond even the top-rated TV shows.
Fox Sports executives have been tracking a metric called total viewing consumption over the past few years to gauge TV viewership. It multiplies average household ratings – the typical measure for a TV show’s viewership – by the number of minutes that show is on TV over the course of the year.
In essence, the Reds and other MLB teams fare much better in total viewing consumption because they’re on the air for so many more hours over the course of a year than a hit show would be.
Take last year. The Reds averaged 32,000 households watching their broadcasts on Fox Sports Ohio last year. That’s pretty good, especially considering they had their third straight last-place finish. They posted a 3.8 average household rating, meaning 3.8 percent of TV households tuned in to Reds games. Their prime-time ratings ranked 17th among MLB’s 30 teams, according to Forbes.
But those ratings were well shy of popular shows like “The Big Bang Theory,” which averaged 125,000 local households over the 2016-17 season, or “NCIS,” which averaged 112,000. But those shows are on for a half-hour and hour, respectively, and air once a week. The Reds are on 162 times last season with games typically lasting about three hours.
Reds games were on TV for 29,355 minutes last season. New episodes of “Big Bang” aired for just 720 minutes, while “NCIS” was on for 1,440 minutes.
Multiply all of that Reds air time by their ratings, and they had total viewership consumption of 939.4 million viewer minutes. By comparison, “NCIS” had a paltry 161 million viewer minutes, while “Big Bang” had 90 million.
“It’s no secret that Cincinnati has always been a great baseball town, and when we look at Reds viewing in terms of total time spent we really get a clear picture of how dominant the Reds are locally all season, and how that viewing piles up over a 162-game season,” said Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports executive vice president of research and strategy. “Notice, for example, that the Reds attract more than 10 times as much total viewing as “The Big Bang Theory.” That is marketplace domination, and we see similar trends all over the country.”
Mulvihill said this new metric won’t replace ratings for Fox Sports or advertisers in determining ad rates, but it does provide valuable information to Fox.
“Our business partners find this interesting, but I think they’re going to continue to focus primarily on metrics that speak specifically to their own campaigns,” Mulvihill said. “Looking at total consumption just helps us paint the most accurate picture of how much a major league team really controls its market over the course of a season.”
Meantime, the Reds will start to pile up viewership numbers again this season beginning Friday with the Opening Day game at 4:10 p.m. vs. the Washington Nationals after it was postponed from Thursday due to inclement weather. The game will air on Fox Sports Ohio and WKRC-TV (Channel 12).
No comments:
Post a Comment