Nielsen to Measure Twitter Chatter About TV Shows; As DVRs Shift TV Habits, Ratings Calculations Follow; Facebook Adds TV Partners Overseas
October 7, 2013 Leave a comment
October 6, 2013
As DVRs Shift TV Habits, Ratings Calculations Follow
One day after Fox introduced the Headless Horseman drama “Sleepy Hollow” last month, the television world was impressed by its overnight rating, a 3.4 among adults age 18 to 49. Fox knew it would grow: based on last season’s viewing trends, Fox figured the premiere episode would finish between a 5.1 and a 5.4 rating once seven days of digital video recorder playback were added. Evidently, even the network’s rosiest outlook wasn’t rosy enough. When the seven-day data came in on Sunday, it showed that the premiere episode scored a 5.8 rating, a gain of fully two-thirds from its starting point.That’s what live television is these days — just a starting point. On-demand viewing behaviors, which have been reshaping television since the first TiVo DVR was shipped in 1999, are becoming more pronounced with each passing year, sometimes to the benefit of networks and advertisers and other times to their detriment.
What is notable about the start of the new fall TV season, according to network executives, is a surge in not just delayed viewing, but very-delayed viewing. Some people who might have previously time-shifted the new NBC drama “The Blacklist” by one day, for example, are now waiting longer to watch, partly because of the sheer number of shows on their mental to-watch lists.
“We believe that the four- to seven-day lift is going to be significantly higher this year than last year,” said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer at CBS.
This is simultaneously good and bad for CBS and its counterparts — good because a higher total rating after seven days helps prove that television networks can still spawn hugely popular shows, even in an age of media fragmentation, but bad because advertisers aren’t currently paying for all the viewers who come along later. Changes in viewer behavior continue to outpace changes in the television business model.
“Most viewing is still occurring during the first three days, but if more viewing continues to shift to four-to-seven, or beyond, we won’t be getting fully compensated,” Joe Earley, chief operating officer of Fox Broadcasting, said in an e-mail.
That’s because most ads are bought and sold based on three days of live and on-demand commercial viewing. The more viewing that happens after the three-day mark, the more aggressive the networks will become about trying to charge for seven days of viewing.
But they’re chasing a ball that shrinks as it bounces along. While studies affirm that DVR users don’t skip every ad, everyone agrees that they do skip some. The newest DVRs let users record virtually every show they’d ever have time to watch, and more. And new ad-skipping technologies are emerging all the time, like Dish Network’s AutoHop, which automatically bypasses the ads on every prime-time network telecast.
To be sure, the majority of television is still watched live; only half of American households with televisions even have DVRs. But most directional arrows are pointing toward on-demand’s dominance in the future, thanks to services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or the DVR.
Already, a handful of relatively small shows on cable, like IFC’s “Portlandia” and BBC America’s “Copper,” have had their ratings more than double thanks to seven days of DVR playback. (Seven-day data usually takes several weeks to be compiled.) FX’s “The Bridge” is the latest (and highest-rated) show to make such a claim. Weekly telecasts of the first season, which began in July, have been averaging 827,000 viewers age 18 to 49 in the overnights, which include live viewership as well as same-night DVR playback; the totals have been more than doubling to 1.68 million with seven days of DVR playback.
Variety, in an article last week about “The Bridge,” theorized that some people wait before they watch “10 p.m. dramas with complicated story lines that may require more attention and mental energy than people can muster at the end of a long day.”
Mr. Poltrack, of CBS, said his prediction of increased viewership beyond three days was predicated on CBS’s proprietary daily surveys of about 2,000 viewers. “People are telling us that they’re ‘behind’ on their DVR and VOD viewing, because there’s just so much that they want to see,” and that they are often using the weekends to catch up, he said.
It’s no accident that Mr. Poltrack mentioned VOD, an acronym for video-on-demand systems operated by cable and satellite companies. While VOD is sometimes an afterthought — for Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow,” it contributed fewer viewers than DVRs did — the networks would rather people watch that way than via DVR.
“It’s clearly an excellent alternative for us because it is usually fast-forward disabled,” said Mr. Earley of Fox.
While ABC has taken to running ads this fall for “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” that encourage people to “watch live,” ostensibly to avoid spoilers, CBS and Fox are running ads that steer people to VOD systems to catch up on shows they’ve missed. Mr. Poltrack was blunt about why: “Our goal now is to move as much DVR viewing to VOD as we can.”
VOD versions of episodes generally include the same ads that were shown with the live telecast, because that way Nielsen will include the VOD views in its TV ratings. The networks expect to be able to insert fresh, personalized ads into VOD episodes in the future, rendering moot a lot of the industry’s current concerns about on-demand.
But for now, DVRs remain the main mode of time-shifting. Jonathan Steuer, chief research officer for TiVo, has observed that dramas have the highest proportion of long-delayed viewing, while comedies have far less.
As a DVR gains more storage capacity — increasingly they are Internet-connected and cloud-based — “it becomes a binge-viewing tool,” Mr. Steuer said. Catch-up behavior can help big shows become bigger over time.
“People think to themselves, ‘I’m going to sign up for a season pass for a new show, wait three weeks to see if it gets canceled or not and then start bingeing it,’ ” he said.
Mr. Steuer knows from personal experience — he has been hoarding episodes of CBS’s “Hostages” and NBC’s “The Blacklist,” and he says he is planning to start watching both series later this month, well outside even the seven-day window.
October 6, 2013
Nielsen to Measure Twitter Chatter About TV Shows
Only 98,600 people wrote messages on Twitter about the two-hour season premiere of “Grey’s Anatomy” last month. That’s a tiny fraction of the 9.3 million who, according to Nielsen, watched the show that night.
But the posts, 225,000 of them in total, were seen by millions of Twitter users, some of whom might have fired up their digital video recorders or laptops to watch the episode later.
Nielsen is now measuring what it calls the “unique audience” for Twitter posts about television, providing a more complete view of the phenomenon known as social TV. On Monday the company is introducing Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a product announced last year that professes to measure all the activity and reach of Twitter conversation about shows, even if it has yet to be embraced by television executives and gain a broad client base.
“We feel this is going to be a credibility-building moment for the industry,” said Andrew Somosi, the chief executive of SocialGuide, an analytics company that Nielsen acquired last November, in part to create the new product.
Measures of posts about a TV show (“Can’t wait for ‘The Walking Dead’ to start”) are just the tip of Twitter’s iceberg, Mr. Somosi said in an interview: “The full iceberg is the extent to which people are seeing those tweets.” For example, the 225,000 posts about the Sept. 26 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” were seen by 2.8 million distinct Twitter accounts, according to Nielsen’s algorithms.
It is impossible to say how many of those users watched the show as a result of the posts, but previous research has found that Twitter activity sometimes spurs viewership. Twitter has made collaboration with the television industry a priority as it seeks to impress investors; the prospectus for its initial public offering, published Thursday, mentioned television 42 times.
Executives at Nielsen say they expect that TV networks will start to promote their Twitter TV Ratings performance the same way they do broadcast ratings. But it is unclear how many networks or advertisers are actually paying to receive the overnight data. Nielsen declined to name any customers, and representatives of only two media companies — Discovery Communications, the Discovery Channel owner, and the ad-buying giant Universal McCann — were quoted in a news release about the new product.
“This is just the beginning; the data hasn’t been available until now,” said Sean Casey, who founded SocialGuide and is now its senior vice president for product.
During the week of Sept. 23, for example, the finale of AMC’s “Breaking Bad” ranked No. 1 in the Twitter TV Ratings, with 1.2 million posts that reached 9.3 million Twitter accounts, according to Nielsen. Two episodes of NBC’s “The Voice” also ranked in the top 10, reaching 3.8 million and then 2.7 million accounts. Interestingly, one of four new episodes that week of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” cracked the top 10. It was the one broadcast Sept. 26, with a sketch that set off a Twitter feud between Mr. Kimmel and Kanye West.
Mr. Casey said he and his colleagues had a variety of techniques to capture posts about shows and exclude those that merely use similar words. (With the ABC drama “Scandal,” for instance, messages that mention “a scandal” would be thrown out.) In the future they plan to distinguish between a TV star’s posts about his or her own show (which are not currently measured) and posts from viewers, so networks (and presumably talent agents) can tell how influential a star’s posts are.
Some networks may question Nielsen’s methodology, especially since a TV-related post is said to be viewed whenever it is loaded on the Web or whenever it shows up on screen, however briefly, on a mobile device.
More generally, skepticism abounds about how representative Twitter chatter is — or isn’t.
“What people often lose sight of is the fact that the overwhelming majority of conversations about TV shows still take place offline,” said Ed Keller, the chief executive of the Keller Fay Group, a market research firm that specializes in word of mouth and supplies data to networks like CBS.
The firm’s surveys consistently indicate that 80 percent of conversations about TV shows happen in person and 10 percent happen on the phone, with most of the remaining 10 percent occurring online.
“The conversations that take place in the real world can often be quite different from those that take place on social media,” Mr. Keller said.
Oct 6, 2013
Facebook Adds TV Partners Overseas
The rivalry between Facebook Inc.FB +3.78% and Twitter Inc. over social conversations around television shows is moving overseas.
Facebook Monday will disclose plans to provide data about its users’ comments related to major television programs to 10 networks in eight countries, including France, the U.K., Germany, Brazil and India.
Stations like TF1 in France, Channel 4 in the U.K., ARD in Germany, Esporte Interativo in Brazil and STAR networks in India, plan to use the data to show advertisers that their programming is generating online buzz and conversation, potentially boosting the price of advertising.
Facebook recently began offering data about how many “actions” — likes, comments, or shares — a television episode inspires to U.S. partners. Monday’s announcement extends the initiative overseas, where Facebook believes it has an advantage over its competitors because of its international reach.
Facebook says 957 million, or 83% of its users, are outside the U.S. and Canada. That’s more than five times the 169 million Twitter users outside the U.S.
Facebook’s international move comes as media researcher Nielsen publishes for the first time details about Twitter activity regarding TV shows in the U.S. In August, Twitter announced a partnership with ad research and consulting firm Kantar Media to support planning and analytics for the U.K. television industry, a Twitter spokeswoman said.
Facebook already allows television broadcasters to use real-time public posts of users and broadcast them during live television events.
The new partnerships in the U.S. and overseas allow television stations to mine personal conversations between Facebook users – albeit in anonymous form – and get detailed information on how their audience is reacting to programming.
In prepared remarks provided to The Wall Street Journal ahead of a Monday speech in France, Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships for Facebook, said the data are valuable because they reflect the reactions of real people. Conversations about popular TV shows, he said, “are happening between friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors.”
Rose, in his prepared remarks, pointed to television events, like the finale of the show Breaking Bad, the birth of Prince George, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey and Wimbledon, that generated a lot of comments on Facebook.
When singer Miley Cyrus demonstrated the sexually suggestive dance move known as “twerking” during the MTV Video Music Awards in August, Rose said nine million people, representing 90% of viewers, generated 26 million interactions on Facebook. Last spring’s NBA finals between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs generated 125 million interactions, he said
The new data program is still in its infancy, and it’s unclear exactly how television networks will use the information.
Scott Symonds, managing director of media for online marketing firm AKQA, said television stations could use the data to show advertisers that TV shows are “creating ripples that last longer” than the initial programming.
Facebook’s data could also help television stations break down audiences beyond simple age and gender demographics, he said. “It has your personal information,” he says.
Soon, the conversations happening on social media could help shape television content itself.
Rose, in his prepared remarks, pointed to a 2010 campaign started on Facebook promoting actress Betty White as a host for Saturday Night Live.
Initially, the idea “seemed crazy to just about everyone,” Rose said. But the campaign gained 500,000 “likes” on Facebook over two months. White hosted the show, which wound up as the highest-rated episode in two years, he said.
Nielsen Preps Its Twitter TV Report, While Facebook Extends Data Partnership To Foreign Networks
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Nielsen is set to publish its first report with TV rankings based on data from Twitter. The report, which comes out on Monday accordingto the Wall Street Journal
, will look at the number of tweets about a show and the size of the audience that sees them.
This is an important move for Twitter ahead of its IPO because it sees TV-related data as an important part of its monetization plans. Providing data about TV viewer engagement is also a key part of Twitter’s rivalry with Facebook, which has been trying to distract from the Nielsen-Twitter partnership by presenting itself as an alternative source of potentially valuable information to networks. Facebook announced last month that it will begin sending a weekly report to major broadcasters in the U.S. detailing user activity around TV programs on the social network. Now Facebook plans to extend its reach by providing data to TV shows from 10 networks in eight countries, says a report in the Wall Street Journal.
As Sarah Perez pointed out, however, despite having 1.15 billion monthly active users compared to Twitter’s 200 million, Facebook’s looser definition of active engagement might make its data difficult for networks to analyze. In this particular competition, Twitter is currently ahead of Facebook with its Nielsen partnership, TV Ad Targeting programs, tools like Twitter Amplify, which allows broadcasters to embed short video clips in tweets in near real-time and an experimental feature that will allow users to playback TV-related tweets when they watch a show after it originally aired. One potential drawback for Twitter, however, is that its user base may be too small to convince network executives of its data validity.
No matter who ultimately wins the battle to become the preferred “second screen” app of viewers, Twitter and Facebook’s efforts to provide data to broadcasters is a boon for TV fans because it helps boost shows that have a relatively small audience, but deep cultural impact and engaged audience. This may convince TV networks to spend more advertising dollars reaching the younger audiences that use Twitter and also influence their thinking when it comes to deciding which shows to renew or cancel. Users who are engaged enough while watching the show to talk about it online means they may also be paying more attention to ads aired during their favorite TV shows. (Just imagine if “My So-Called Life,” “Arrested Development” or “Veronica Mars,” all shows with fervent followers but low small viewer numbers, had been able to benefit from online chatter about them).
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