Sports TV Ratings – Page 3

Sports TV Scorecard for Friday, December 19

December 22, 2014 by Morgan Wick

I’m going to say right now that I fully expect SportsTVRatings.com to be shut down or at least be forced to scale back by Nielsen at some point. The About page says that “if you’ve seen this much daily cable sports data posted elsewhere, let us know where – we’ll read that and find another hobby!” Well, there used to be a site nearly as comprehensive as what they have, even though it posted on a weekly and not daily basis – remind me to tell you the story of Son of the Bronx at some point. What may help this site last longer is that it isn’t on a blog-hosting service like Blogger and isn’t giving away their real names, so it might be more difficult for Nielsen to contact them and have much force behind it, but possibly not much so considering they have a link to their e-mail.

This site has viewership (and usually 18-49 data) for every single show on an English-language cable sports network, including beIN Sports which SotB has never covered to the same extent as the others (although it appears to be nearly as devoid of viewers as Fox Sports 2, though its peaks are significantly higher than what FS2 could dream of). It also has the weekly primetime and total day summary numbers for each network, without weekly or yearly comparisons but with 18-49 numbers. Because the data is daily and not weekly, using it to calculate median minute ratings and integrating its 18-49 numbers with SotB/Awful Announcing’s household ratings would be a major pain, and the former problem is exacerbated by Excel not recognizing their tables when creating a web-based data query, and taking forever to select the whole table in IE10 Metro mode.

What I can do is present a proof-of-concept of an idea I had when I first discovered how comprehensive SotB was being, daily scorecards for studio shows and sports events throughout the day similar to what TVNewser does for news networks. This would be even more time-consuming than the Studio Show Scorecards were when I was doing them a year ago, and there are other reasons for me not to want to do this on a regular basis, but I present it as an idea for how the site might be able to avoid the fate of so many sites to face the wrath of Nielsen – even if all it would withhold from publishing are the time periods from noon-3 PM and 3 AM-6 AM ET. Events in bold are live sporting events.

Sports Ratings Report for Weeks of November 17-30

December 16, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Primetime – Nov 17-23
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
3538	+16%	+11%
#2	=	=
1137	-4%	+3%
#3	=	=
465	-44%	-34%
#4	=	+2
351	+65%	+158%
#5	+1	-1
223	+46%	-3%
#6	-1	-1
160	-9%	+8%
#7	=	=
87	-1%	-5%
#8	=	+1
79	+10%	-4%
#9	=	-1
67	+16%	-26%
#10	=	=
45	-8%	-13%

Total Day – Nov 17-23
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
1192	-3%	-0%
#2	+1	+1
317	+1%	+10%
#3	-1	-1
301	-19%	-11%
#4	=	=
128	-20%	-28%
#5	=	+1
123	+31%	+64%
#6	+1	-1
97	+37%	-12%
#7	-1	+1
73	-13%	+26%
#8	=	-1
62	+5%	-3%
#9	=	-1
58	+12%	0%
#10	=	=
28	-13%	-7%

There’s a very real possibility I may not need SotB’s Awful Announcing posts (which at this point, include everything I already have except for the rankings) to do the weekly network summaries anymore. TVNewser’s “Cable News Ranker” posts include a document with week-by-week, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter, and (presumably) year-by-year reports of average audience, average number of households watching, and household “coverage” percentage (a number that presumably reflects the audience estimates that have hardly been reported at all all year)… for (almost) every single Nielsen-rated cable network, as well as each network’s rank compared to the others. To see Nielsen include so many numbers I had thought I was the only one interested in, as well as a number I didn’t even dare to think of but is incredibly useful to put the others in context, that can potentially allow me to include networks SotB doesn’t report information for for whatever reason, blew me away. This may be the most felicitous development since I learned about how comprehensive SotB was being on his blog.

Or, it would be… but there’s a problem. No matter what, TVNewser does only one of these posts a week. So every month It puts up the rankings for the entire month just past but skips a week. Okay, I can just use TVNewser for monthly wrapups, but every three months it puts up the quarterly rankings for the three months just past, and skips that month. I’d bet anything that at year’s end it’ll put up the yearly rankings and skip the fourth quarter, but I don’t think these posts even go back that far, which actually surprises me because I’m pretty damn sure I’ve seen the sort of image that leads the post before, even if it didn’t have this comprehensive document. So it’s vaguely useful for a year-end rating roundup, but that’s it, and no matter what I use it for I can’t do the year-on-year comparisons I’m used to for the near future. (I guess I can accept that it would get pretty crowded if at the end of the year you had the rankings for the last week, and for December, and for the fourth quarter, and for the entire year…)

So this is more of a proof of concept than anything else, taking the November ratings, one of the four all year where I can take the month’s ratings and do a comparison to the previous month. Because I still can’t do the median minute ratings without SotB’s comprehensive information, I would probably still split primetime and total day into two tables given the sheer magnitude of information involved. I’m also assuming “ENN” is short for ESPNEWS, but it’s entirely possible it’s just not on the list; Fox Deportes is the only Spanish-language sports network on the list, and not only have I seen plenty of ratings reported for Univision Deportes and ESPN Deportes (and seen UDN on both the TVMI and TVbytheNumbers lists), I’ve actually seen UDN advertise its weekly summary data of this sort, so clearly not all Nielsen-rated networks are on the list (the disclaimer says it “includes only those cable networks who [sic] supply program names to the industry”, whatever that means – for what it’s worth HBO, which often tops the daily lists with shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood, doesn’t show up either, and neither does FXX, but FXM does).

Regardless, the lack of Spanish-language networks means I’m limiting this list to the same bank of networks I always use. Overall rankings are out of 96 networks for primetime and 98 for total day; note that Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are each considered to be two networks for Nielsen purposes for their nighttime adult-oriented Nick@Nite and Adult Swim blocks respectively, and only the latter appear in the primetime ranks. Yes, that means MLBN is very near the bottom in both measures. It could be worse; Fox Sports 2 outpaces only Tr3s, MTV’s Hispanic-oriented network, and the dying corpse of G4. (MLBN and FS2 have VH1 Classic, mun2, and Al Jazeera America between them in some order in both measures.)

	PT	Ovr Rank Vwr (000)	LM Chng	HH (Cvr)	LM Chng		TD	Ovr Rank Vwr (000)	LM Chng	HH (Cvr)	LM Chng
1		#1	=	2.4	+19%	1		#1	=	0.9	+12%
=		3881	+21%	2.9	+0.4	=		1376	+14%	1.1	+0.1
2		#13	+13	0.6	+76%	2		#28	+1	0.2	+4%
+1		949	+82%	1.0	+0.5	+1		316	+3%	0.3	=
3		#30	-2	0.3	+7%	3		#38	+10	0.2	+26%
+1		540	+4%	0.4	=	+1		274	+32%	0.3	+0.1
4		#50	-41	0.2	-76%	4		#61	-34	0.1	-63%
-2		276	-76%	0.2	-0.7	-2		124	-63%	0.1	-0.2
5		#64	+15	0.1	+49%	5		#70	+13	0.1	+45%
+2		163	+55%	0.2	+0.1	+5		81	+59%	0.1	=
6		#71	-5	0.1	-4%	6		#72	=	0.1	+3%
-1		132	-10%	0.1	=	=		79	+1%	0.1	=
7		#72	-3	0.1	-3%	7		#74	-10	0.1	+2%
-1		132	+2%	0.1	=	-2		76	unch	0.1	=
8		#79	+4	0.1	+33%	8		#80	=	0.0	+4%
+1		85	+8%	0.1	=	+1		59	+5%	0.1	=
9		#83	+4	0.0	+10%	9		#82	-3	0.0	-4%
+1		69	+15%	0.1	=	-1		55	-5%	0.1	=
10		#90	-8	0.0	-43%	10		#92	-14	0.0	-50%
-2		44	-45%	0.1	=	-3		28	-53%	0.0	-0.1

Sports Ratings Report for Week of November 10-16 and Weekend Sports Ratings for November 22-23

December 1, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Primetime – Nov 10-16
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
3048	-0%	-12%
#2	=	=
1183	-6%	+23%
#3	=	=
836	+113%	-5%
#4	=	=
213	-11%	-26%
#5	=	+1
176	-11%	+100%
#6	=	-1
153	+47%	0%
#7	+1	=
88	+13%	+6%
#8	-1	+1
72	-15%	+6%
#9	=	-1
58	-17%	-24%
#10	=	=
49	+40%	+36%

Total Day – Nov 10-16
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
1226	-4%	-11%
#2	+1	=
370	+25%	-6%
#3	-1	=
313	-3%	+18%
#4	=	=
161	-10%	-17%
#5	=	=
94	-45%	-17%
#6	=	+3
84	-2%	+53%
#7	=	-1
71	0%	0%
#8	+1	-1
59	+18%	-5%
#9	-1	-1
52	-15%	-15%
#10	=	=
32	+52%	+45%

This post is a week late because TV Media Insights didn’t have its numbers for last Sunday until today, and TVbytheNumbers never put up Saturday numbers at all, which is okay because TVMI included several college football games from the afternoon. If I had numbers from Sports Media Watch for daytime broadcast games, I’d roll this post into this week. I did incorporate household ratings (and in one case, all the numbers) for cable college football games from the weekly Awful Announcing posts. Numbers for ABC and Fox primetime college football games from the weekend I’m only certain of to the ten thousands place, as TV Media Insights listed all shows on the Big Four networks Saturday with a multiple of ten thousand viewers.

NFL Network seems to be seeing some lasting impact from CBS’ coverage of Thursday Night Football. Both of the NFLN-exclusive games we’ve seen so far improved on the same week last year and Chiefs-Raiders did not, so take this with a grain of salt, but NFLN has seen year-on-year gains in primetime of at least 23% and total day of 18% each of the past two weeks.

Finally, I went with a Top 25 for this week’s month-old ratings in part because I wasn’t quite sure what parts of HBO’s boxing card to include. UniMas actually attracted more viewers than ESPN for the USA-Honduras friendly, surprising for a match involving the US but not Mexico.

Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

2014 College Basketball Postseason Ratings Roundup

November 22, 2014 by Morgan Wick

This post is going to be a little more useful than last week’s. Here are ratings for all 67 games of the NCAA Tournament, every game of the NIT on traditional television, and every game or coverage window of the women’s tournament. The top four games of the tournament all involved Kentucky; their Elite 8 and third round games both did better than the other Final Four game, though curiously the much-hyped matchup between Kentucky and Louisville not only did worse than all those games, but another third-round game involving North Carolina. Kentucky was also involved in the most-watched second-round game. Only two NCAA Tournament games not on truTV did worse than the most watched NIT game, the championship game. Meanwhile, the top seven women’s games involved at least one of the two undefeated teams, Connecticut or Notre Dame.

CBS numbers from Sports Media Watch, Turner and ESPN numbers from Son of the Bronx. 18-49 numbers, when available, from TVbytheNumbers and The Futon Critic. Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

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Sports Ratings Highlights for Week of November 3-9 and Weekend Sports Ratings for November 15-16

November 19, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Primetime
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
3049	-40%	-14%
#2	=	=
1261	+24%	+33%
#3	=	+1
392	-34%	-30%
#4	=	-1
239	-16%	-62%
#5	=	=
197	+79%	+16%
#6	+1	=
104	+28%	-3%
#7	-1	+2
85	-11%	+8%
#8	+1	=
78	+32%	-18%
#9	-1	-2
70	+17%	-33%
#10	=	=
35	0%	+30%

Total Day
Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
1280	-25%	-11%
#2	+1	+1
323	+12%	+18%
#3	-1	-1
297	-10%	-12%
#4	+1	+1
178	+58%	+20%
#5	-1	-1
171	+41%	+8%
#6	+1	=
86	+30%	+18%
#7	-1	=
71	-7%	0%
#8	+1	-1
61	+11%	-14%
#9	-1	=
50	-14%	-22%
#10	=	=
21	-32%	0%

I don’t know if I’m going to extend the most-viewed sports events list that incorporates SportsBusiness Daily information to a full top 50 like I did this week. I was doing top 10s before, and honestly I strongly suspect I’m missing Spanish-language numbers for another Mexico friendly, but I wanted to stretch my legs this week with SBD reporting a full bank of information. I may still try to incorporate everything with over a million viewers, and a few things with less, in future weeks when SBD cooperates, but things will be very much played by ear. A lot depends on what I feel I can do in the future without running afoul of the powers that be, as I’d like to be able not to have to wait for the paywall at some point in the future.

The late NFL doubleheader didn’t have very much overrun into primetime and ended up not being reported by TV Media Insights, so I only know the viewership figures reported by TVbytheNumbers to the ten thousands place and they may not be entirely accurate. Also, some information about the live Bellator card I needed to find a Spike press release for in order to have numbers for the full card.

Oh, and of course the titles I added to the charts on the sides mean I have even more space I need to fill in this area…

Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

2013-14 College Basketball Ratings Roundup

November 14, 2014 by Morgan Wick

In honor of the start of the college basketball season, here are last year’s college basketball ratings!

Getting nailed on the Olympics is one thing, getting nailed on college basketball is quite another. SportsBusiness Daily had two different weeks where they didn’t get any CBS numbers in time for their deadline, and Sports Media Watch didn’t get numbers for the total of four college basketball windows that were affected by that for its own college basketball ratings roundup. The highest of the four games’ overnights I estimated would have finished with around a 1.7 final household rating, which is high enough that I’m only listing the top ten regular-season college basketball ratings of the year. I am listing all 109 women’s college basketball games to air on a national Nielsen-rated network, though, although the one CBS game didn’t have viewers reported so I have to guesstimate it. (That chart is going to be in a very unfinished state.)

The most-watched game not involving Duke, Michigan State or Kentucky was San Diego State-Kansas on CBS January 5 with 2.623 million viewers, also the most watched game not involving a power conference team (assuming you count the American as a power conference – Louisville-Kentucky drew 3.246 million viewers to CBS December 28). Note that that game had an NFL playoff game as a lead-in and spilled into primetime. The next such games were Michigan-Ohio State in a Big Ten semifinal, which drew 2.471 million viewers to CBS March 15, and Syracuse-Virginia, which drew 2.45 million viewers to ESPN March 1. The most watched game on ESPN not to involve Duke, either Michigan team, Kentucky, or Syracuse was Kansas-Texas February 1, which drew 1.924 million viewers. The most-watched non-CBS game I don’t have 18-49 numbers for is Kansas State-Kansas January 11, which drew 1.39 million viewers to ESPN.

The most-watched game to involve solely non-power-conference teams was the Mountain West Championship which drew 1.909 million viewers to CBS March 15. The most-watched game involving a non-power-conference team on ESPN was Boise State-Kentucky on December 10, which drew 1.213 million viewers; the most-watched non-power-conference-only game on ESPN was the WCC Championship March 11, with 1.045 million viewers. The most-watched game between two non-power-conference teams that wasn’t a conference championship was VCU-Saint Louis on ESPN February 15, which drew just 711,000 viewers. (If the American counts as a non-power conference, Connecticut-Louisville drew 1.772 million viewers to CBS on March 8, the American championship between those two schools drew 1.688 million viewers to ESPN March 15, and the game at Connecticut drew 1.522 million viewers to ESPN January 18. If the Big East counts as a non-power conference, Villanova-Syracuse drew 1.448 million viewers to CBS December 28, and Butler-Georgetown drew 1.083 million viewers to CBS February 8.)

The most watched game not on ESPN, CBS, or ABC was Ohio State-Notre Dame on ESPN2 December 21, which drew 1.323 million viewers and only barely made the top 100 overall. The most watched game not on ESPN, CBS, ABC, or ESPN2 was Ohio State-Marquette on Fox November 16 with 799,000 viewers, followed by the Big East Championship on Fox Sports 1 March 15 with 702,000 viewers. ESPNU’s most-watched game was Clemson-Syracuse February 9 with 675,000 viewers, which was edged out by the Pac-12 Championship on Fox Sports 1 March 15 with 680,000 viewers. Its next-most-watched game was Belmont-Kentucky December 21 with 577,000 viewers.

Top Ten Most-Watched Regular Season College Basketball Games of the 2013-14 Season

		Vwr (mil)	HH	18-49	Time	Net
1	MCBB: Duke @ Syracuse	4.745	2.9	1.6	2/1 6:30 PM	ESPN
2	Big Ten Championship: Michigan State v. Michigan	4.525	2.7		3/16 3:30 PM	CBS
3	MCBB: Syracuse @ Duke	4.159	2.4	1.3	2/22 7:00 PM	ESPN
4	MCBB: Michigan State v. Kentucky	4.002	2.6	1.4	11/12 7:30 PM	ESPN
5	MCBB: North Carolina @ Duke	3.498	2.1	1.2	3/8 9:00 PM	ESPN
6	MCBB: Louisville @ Kentucky	3.246	2.0		12/28 4:23 PM	CBS
7	ACC Championship: Virginia v. Duke	3.168	2.2	1.0	3/16 1:00 PM	ESPN
8	Big Ten Semifinal: Michigan State v. Wisconsin	3.161	1.9		3/15 4:15 PM	CBS
9	SEC Championship: Florida v. Kentucky	2.99	2.0	0.9	3/16 3:15 PM	ESPN
10	MCBB: Kansas v. Duke	2.977	2.1	1.3	11/12 10:19 PM	ESPN

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Sports Ratings Report for October 27-November 2 and Weekend Sports Ratings for November 8-9

November 12, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
5062	+65%	+113%
#2	+1	=
1014	+81%	+7%
#3	-1	=
595	-2%	-1%
#4	=	=
283	+17%	+20%
#5	+1	=
110	+24%	-39%
#6	+1	+2
95	+32%	+3%
#7	-2	-1
81	-49%	-21%
#8	=	-1
60	+9%	-39%
#9	=	=
59	+11%	-8%
#10	=	=
35	+84%	+17%

Vwrs (000)	Change
Vwrs (000)	Lst Wk	Lst Yr
#1	=	=
1710	+42%	+45%
#2	=	=
331	+3%	+2%
#3	=	=
289	+38%	+2%
#4	=	+2
121	-16%	+44%
#5	=	-1
113	-17%	-34%
#6	=	+2
76	-12%	+3%
#7	+1	=
66	+29%	-13%
#8	+1	+1
58	+21%	-11%
#9	-2	-4
55	+4%	-38%
#10	=	=
31	0%	0%

All right, so I’m trying out a new split-chart system. The table on the left has the primetime numbers, the table on the right the total day numbers. I hope there aren’t people with screen resolutions small enough that the tables run into each other (or for that matter, that they wouldn’t run into each other if I had an app pinned to the side on my Surface that doesn’t work), and as is I may have to start writing longer analyses to fill the height of the table in order to avoid wonkiness on the main blog page and big gaps on the post itself.

The year-by-year comparisons suggest that the MLB Postseason is resulting in some continuing lift for Fox Sports 1. (We’ll see what happens in a week without the World Series on Fox luring people to the channel, but the Series resulted in very little lift to FSL’s postgame shows. On the other hand, FSL seems to have seen very little continuing aftereffect from the postseason in general, suggesting its current format is not clicking with audiences any more than it was a year ago.) It’s disappointing that a big Baylor-Oklahoma game couldn’t beat a substantially less-big SEC game on ESPN this past weekend, but FS1 should take some heart that it did as well as it did, topping two million viewers in a noon time slot and beating all but one nationally televised game in the time slot.

This week, with-locals numbers for MNF and TNF; next week, the return of the charts with numbers from SportsBusiness Daily!

Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

Sports Ratings Report for Week of October 20-26 and Weekend Sports Ratings for November 1-2

November 6, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Primetime Vwrs			Total Day Vwrs
(000)	LW/LY		(000)	LW/LY
3074	=	+13%	1207	=	+3%
#1	=	+1%	#1	=	-7%
606	+2	+74%	321	+1	+18%
#2	+1	-17%	#2	=	+4%
559	=	+10%	209	+1	-2%
#3	-1	-27%	#3	=	-13%
241	-2	-86%	144	-2	-69%
#4	=	+36%	#4	+1	+31%
72	+1	-6%	136	=	-11%
#6	+2	-13%	#5	-1	-12%
160	=	+24%	86	+1	+18%
#5	=	+63%	#6	=	+6%
55	+2	-11%	53	+1	-13%
#7	-1	-41%	#7	=	-29%
53	-1	-31%	48	+1	-17%
#8	-1	-38%	#8	=	-21%
42	-3	-54%	31	-3	-61%
#9	+1	+27%	#9	+1	-23%
19	=	-55%	31	+1	0%
#10	-1	-55%	#9	=	-33%

Why is this week’s primetime/total-day viewership chart the same as last week’s? Because no thanks to Time Warner Cable’s fantabulous “customer service”, I don’t actually have Internet of my own at the moment and so can’t concentrate for long enough to work on my newest idea for how to organize them. These numbers are for the week of October 20-26. Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

Sports Ratings Report for Week of October 13-19 and Weekend Sports Ratings for October 25-26

October 29, 2014 by Morgan Wick

Primetime Vwrs			Total Day Vwrs
(000)	LW/LY		(000)	LW/LY
2713	=	-15%	1174	=	+8%
#1	=	+1%	#1	=	-4%
1663	=	+12%	472	=	+14%
#2	+2	+518%	#2	+3	+230%
349	-1	-51%	272	=	-25%
#4	-1	-45%	#3	-1	-9%
508	+1	-3%	214	+1	+0%
#3	-1	-45%	#4	-1	-22%
77	+2	-14%	152	-1	-32%
#7	-1	-4%	#5	-1	-26%
152	=	+13%	77	+2	+20%
#5	=	+24%	#6	+2	+48%
129	=	+22%	73	=	-1%
#6	+3	+90%	#7	+2	+43%
62	+1	-3%	61	+1	-2%
#9	-1	-17%	#8	-2	+3%
77	=	-24%	58	+1	-3%
#7	-1	-4%	#9	-2	0%
42	-2	-54%	31	-4	-61%
#10	=	+27%	#10	=	-23%

I’m putting up network scorecards again (these are for the week of October 13-19), but with the loss of Son of the Bronx’s full network ratings I can’t do household averages or median minute ratings, and with Nielsen coverage estimates no longer being consistently reported I can’t do normalized averages either. You may see me experiment with a few different methods of presenting the information in the chart; I may ultimately break primetime and total day numbers into two charts. Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.

Sochi 2014 Olympics Ratings Roundup

October 26, 2014 by Morgan Wick

So, you know those Year in Review Sports Ratings Roundup posts I try to do and in fact did last year? Yeeeaaah, turns out I can only do them in odd-numbered years. While the Olympic primetime windows get all the glamor and attention, NBC’s afternoon and late night windows attract many millions of viewers as well, and SportsBusiness Daily only reports numbers for them for the weekend (and the Friday night late night window). I’d like to think the weekday windows have substantially smaller audiences than the weekend windows, especially in daytime, but I have no idea what numbers are normal for them; at best I could assume they’d do no better than eight million viewers but the ratings declines the Sochi games experienced as they went along makes any sort of estimation difficult, and the real number range could be upwards of 9M. There’s not much point in doing more than the Top Live Events list at that point.

Besides those NBC windows, I’m also missing several USA windows, especially from the second week, solely because Son of the Bronx didn’t normally cover that network when his blog was going. He did post a general “ratings recap” post on TV Media Insights, but seemed to abandon it in the second week, and doesn’t seem to have been able to do much to close the NBC gaps. The first chart below contains all the NBC numbers I know about, plus two subsets of the NBCSN coverage NBC broke out in early press releases for context. The second chart contains all the cable windows I know about. Click here to learn more about how to read the charts.