Sports TV Ratings

PT Rnk		TD Rnk			Oct Distr. (000)	PT Vwr (000)	LW/LY	TD Vwr (000)	TD HH	TD Vwr LW/LY
1	=	1	=		98891	2382	-22%	1176	0.8	-9%
	=		=		85%	2382	-11%	1176	-7%	+2%
3	=	2	=		98861	603	-18%	329	0.2	+6%
	=		=		85%	603	+30%	329	+7%	-2%
2	=	3	=		72464	951	+25%	283	0.2	+19%
	=		=		63%	1298	+24%	386	+12%	+40%
6	-1	4	+1		79145	172	+12%	91	0.0	+10%
	=		+4		68%	215	+93%	114	+2%	+63%
8	=	5	+2		82964	99	+5%	89	0.1	+18%
	+1		+4		72%	118	+65%	106	-4%	+77%
4	=	6	-2		90121	236	+33%	85	0.0	-23%
	+1		-2		78%	259	+46%	93	-30%	-17%
5	+1	7	+2		59950	179	+57%	76	0.0	+66%
	-1		-2		52%	295	+4%	126	+104%	-13%
7	=	8	-2		75603	102	+4%	74	0.0	-8%
	=		-2		65%	133	+16%	97	-23%	+14%
9	=	9	-1		75829	64	-25%	55	0.0	-10%
	-1		-2		65%	83	+3%	72	-7%	-4%
10	=	10	=		71026	30	-29%	31	0.0	-32%
	+1		+1		61%	42	+20%	43	-60%	+81%

I’m leaving Da Blog Poll up for another week and doing this for at least another two weeks so I can measure the impact on FS1 of the Oklahoma-Baylor game last week, which finally broke the FS1 record held by the launch-night UFC card and became the first FS1 program to crack the 2-million-viewer barrier. But be warned, the SSS the next two weeks could be pretty chaotic.

Earlier in the week Awful Announcing’s Joe Lucia used the same Son of the Bronx data I use to argue that, when compared to networks that aren’t ESPN, ESPN2, or NFL Network, FS1 is actually doing quite well. Unfortunately, he drew some flawed conclusions and ignored one undeniable fact in his data that shows how much FS1 really is struggling that doesn’t require a comparison to anyone but itself:

• He claims that FS1 is doing well in total day because of UEFA Champions League soccer, which, while it does better than the normal timeslot occupants at 3 and 4 ET, is barely a blip on the radar compared to FS1’s other sports events. It’s far more likely that FS1’s strong total-day performance has more to do with college football and NASCAR practice and qualifying.
• He claims that Crowd Goes Wild has consistently performed well compared to other daily afternoon and evening studio shows on FS1, NBCSN, and MLB Network, going toe to toe for the top spot with Intentional Talk among the shows he compares that aren’t NASCAR Race Hub… ignoring the fact that Crowd Goes Wild’s ratings are ridiculously, insanely inflated when it has NASCAR practice or qualifying as a lead-in.

Those two things, plus the dominance of Race Hub, point to one undeniable fact: a big chunk of FS1’s audience are still disproportionately holdovers from the Speed days, and at least at this point, fans of other sports have not yet found the channel. Yes, even UFC fans; they came out for launch night and have provided some of FS1’s most popular programming, and in fact Lucia also compared UFC Tonight to the daily shows and it wound up coming in second, but that launch night card wasn’t even the most-watched card on cable of 2013, and ratings for The Ultimate Fighter are way down compared to last season on FX. That Speed did well enough that the rest of the FS1 schedule is still comparable to NBCSN and MLBN doesn’t really hide that.

What can be said about FS1 compared to its competition?

• FS1 is fairly consistently placing fourth in total day and primetime behind ESPN, ESPN2, and NFL Network… except this week when it fell to sixth in total day behind the Comcast networks.
• Fox Soccer Daily is doing poorly compared to ESPNFC later in the day, which may sound like a bad comparison until you realize that ESPNFC is one of the worst-performing shows on ESPN2.
• When insulated from NASCAR lead-ins, Crowd Goes Wild is running neck-in-neck with Pro Football Talk, but that may say more about the problems PFT and NBCSN in general are having. CGW could not compete with Intentional Talk during baseball season. Fox Football Daily, meanwhile, seems to lose substantially from its CGW lead-in, which means it’s substantially behind PFT and any other regularly scheduled show in its time slot.
• First-run airings of Fox Sports Live generally don’t fall much below 30,000, which is roughly at CGW’s level, but Sundays can be very vulnerable, at least during football season. In general FSL is very lead-in-dependent, and its re-airs tend to be susceptible to random fluctuations; numbers can get truly pathetic for late-night and early-morning re-airs.
• Fox College Saturday was consistently beating college football pre-game coverage on ESPNU… except for this week.
• This week, without NASCAR RaceDay or other NASCAR coverage as a lead-in, Fox NFL Kickoff still attracted over 100,000 viewers. That put it behind other NFL pregame shows (including Fantasy Football Now, bumped to ESPNEWS for the New York City Marathon, NFL Gameday First earlier in the day, and the Saturday morning ESPN2 airing of NFL Matchup), but did beat re-airs of ESPN2 programming on ESPNEWS earlier and re-airs of NBA Gametime on NBATV. Of course, that’s sort of damning with faint praise, but it did manage to beat Morning Drive on Golf Channel earlier.

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read more

Sports Ratings Highlights for Week of October 21-27

Numbers compiled from a variety of sources, including TV by the Numbers, The Futon Critic, Sports Media Watch, and Son of the Bronx.

Read more

Sports Ratings Highlights for Week of October 14-20

Numbers compiled from a variety of sources, including TV by the Numbers, The Futon Critic, Sports Media Watch, and Son of the Bronx.

Read more

PT Rnk		TD Rnk			Sep Distr. (000)	PT Vwr (000)	LW/LY	TD Vwr (000)	TD HH	TD Vwr LW/LY
1	=	1	=		98852	2681	-5%	1226	0.8	+8%
	=		=		85%	2681	-3%	1226	+4%	-2%
3	=	2	=		98831	633	-8%	299	0.2	-7%
	=		+1		85%	633	+82%	299	-7%	+12%
2	=	3	=		71909	921	-21%	274	0.2	-13%
	=		-1		62%	1266	-12%	377	-13%	-9%
4	=	4	=		89180	269	+22%	143	0.1	+2%
	=		=		77%	298	+101%	159	+12%	+81%
5	=	5	+2		78412	206	+37%	79	0.0	+28%
	+4		+4		68%	260	+348%	100	+37%	+127%
8	+1	6	+2		82736	75	+7%	59	0.0	+5%
	-1		+1		71%	90	+15%	70	+5%	+30%
7	-1	7	+2		75774	80	-29%	58	0.0	+5%
	-1		-2		65%	104	-11%	75	+9%	+3%
6	+1	8	+2		60168	123	+24%	52	0.0	+1%
	-1		-2		52%	202	+7%	86	-0%	-1%
9	-1	9	-4		75568	68	-28%	51	0.0	-27%
	n/a		n/a		65%	89	n/a	66	-43%	n/a
10	=	10	-4		71321	33	-15%	40	0.0	-36%
	-2		-2		62%	46	-39%	55	-44%	+11%

Before last week, only one show in FS1 history had attracted over a million viewers, or had even managed to better that one show’s prelim card. Now there are four. Sure, one of the four was the truck series race from Talladega, but the other was a fairly pedestrian matchup between Washington State and Oregon that aired late at night on the East Coast and outdrew the UFC prelim card it had as a lead-in. Sure, it threatened an upset, but I get the distinct feeling Boise State-Washington could have done better if it happened now, after last week’s Oregon-Washington game. More to the point, the other college football game FS1 aired this week became the fourth most watched college football game in FS1 history, topping every game not mentioned in this paragraph. That game? Texas Tech, admittedly unbeaten and ranked, against then-3-3 West Virginia.

So, did Oregon-Washington also have spillover effects to FS1’s studio shows? The table below compares the daily studio shows I track last week and this week, as well as a few other weekly shows. I tried to filter out the effects of a NASCAR lead-in, which is why Fox NFL Kickoff isn’t on the list. The results? Most studio shows actually went down this week. Monday’s 1 AM Fox Sports Live episode saw a huge jump which could indicate at least some people tuned in after Monday Night Football, but that and the following 2 AM episode were the only two editions to top 100,000 viewers that didn’t have college football or The Ultimate Fighter as a lead-in. 71,000 people saw FSL last Sunday at 11 PM, a big jump from 23,000 the week before, but that fell to 55,000 this week, though 12:30 went up from 50,000 to 60,000 (and 18,000 the week before). It seems clear to me that, two months in, the panel is still a big turn-off.

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read more

This isn’t going to be a regular thing, I’m just catching up from the last month or so of sports ratings reports I missed for various reasons. I have zero numbers for anything other than college football or golf from the Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, so from now on the Top 20 Most-Viewed charts are going to be Top 10 Most-Viewed charts, because even then I’m not completely optimistic that Sunday’s US Open coverage, which had a 1.6 overnight, didn’t sneak in. (Monday’s coverage did get adjusted down two-tenths, though, so maybe it didn’t threaten so much.) This also means the sports ratings highlights are going to be substantially more limited in scope.

Oregon-Washington accomplished its goal, sort of, becoming the second most-watched program in FS1 history, indeed only the second FS1 program to top a million viewers and coming within a hair’s breadth of toppling #1, the UFC card from launch night. But that doesn’t mean Fox didn’t goof up when they moved the game to FS1 to begin with, even after another game involving Oregon against a Washington school also topped a million viewers this past weekend.

As this post explains, moving Oregon-Washington to FS1 wound up costing Fox Stanford-UCLA the following week, another game between ranked teams but one it actually had reason to move to FS1, to clear Fox’s schedule for the uncertainty of when the ALCS game would be on. That game ended up being half of an ABC/ESPN2 reverse mirror instead, and now Fox has to put the Pac-12 on broadcast all four weeks that have yet to be scheduled this season.

At the time the October 12 schedule was finalized, Oregon/Washington pitted #2 v. #15, while Stanford/UCLA pitted #5 against #12. So the average ranking of both games was the same, and Oregon/Washington was a bitter rivalry showcasing the exciting national-title-contending Ducks, but Stanford-UCLA was closer (and thus promised to be a more exciting contest) and would bring in the valuable Los Angeles and Bay Area markets as opposed to the smaller Pacific Northwest markets. So Stanford-UCLA could have had the exact same effect as Oregon-Washington, just a week later, maybe even topping that opening-night UFC card, for reasons other than just propping up the network, and Fox and the Pac-12 had to know at least that last part well before the season, certainly by the point that Fox was considering moving Oregon-Washington to FS1.

And the kicker? Fox needs to build its broadcast network as a college football destination too!

Top 10 Most-Viewed Programs in Fox Sports 1 History (through October 13)

Read more

PT Rnk		TD Rnk			Sep Distr. (000)	PT Vwr (000)	LW/LY	TD Vwr (000)	TD HH	TD Vwr LW/LY
1	=	1	=		98852	2817	-5%	1136	0.8	-9%
	=		=		85%	2817	-13%	1136	-5%	-0%
3	=	2	+1		98831	685	+50%	321	0.2	+14%
	=		+1		85%	685	+59%	321	+10%	+23%
2	=	3	-1		71909	1165	+13%	315	0.2	-10%
	=		-1		62%	1602	+34%	433	-8%	+17%
4	+1	4	+3		89180	221	0%	141	0.1	+37%
	+1		+1		77%	245	+157%	156	+35%	+101%
8	-2	5	+1		75568	94	-53%	69	0.0	-35%
	n/a		n/a		65%	123	n/a	90	-43%	n/a
10	=	6	+2		71321	39	-15%	62	0.0	+3%
	-1		-2		62%	54	-15%	86	+8%	-14%
5	-1	7	-2		78412	150	-49%	62	0.0	-42%
	+2		+1		68%	189	+121%	78	-56%	+51%
9	-2	8	-4		82736	70	-55%	56	0.0	-63%
	-1		=		71%	84	+25%	67	-74%	+36%
6	+2	9	=		75774	113	+31%	55	0.0	-2%
	=		-3		65%	147	+59%	72	+16%	-6%
7	+2	10	=		60168	99	+41%	52	0.0	+35%
	-3		-3		52%	163	-2%	85	+71%	-9%

At least ten different programs in Fuel history topped 200,000 viewers, just about all of them in January 2012 and later. That’s an average of about one every two months. We’re coming up on two months since Fuel was rebranded as FS2, and not only has not one program managed to top 200,000 viewers in that time, there’s not much in the way of prospects for anything to achieve that mark, despite the broader array of programming the rebrand has brought to FS2.

The reason for that? All the UFC programming that previously inhabited FS2 has moved to FS1. FS2 is no longer home to Wednesday UFC cards and European cards – those are now airing on FS1 whenever possible. NASCAR practice and qualifying have attracted decent numbers, as has, surprisingly enough, Australian Rules Football, but the best programming is always going to be on FS1, and combined with FS2’s extremely limited distribution that makes it highly unlikely that anything on FS2 is going to top 200,000 viewers in the near future, though we’ll see what happens with the Big East basketball games being shuffled there.

Does this mean Fox didn’t have enough programming for a second channel at launch? Maybe, maybe not – certainly FS2 was as much as anything about the hope that Fox would eventually have enough inventory to warrant a second channel (as well as being a short-term escape valve). But I can’t help but think all parties would have been better off if, say, Fox Soccer had been rebranded as FS2 and Fuel had become a NASCAR or motorsports-oriented network. Certainly it would have helped quiet the loud complaining from Speed fans.

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read more