Excellent article. It seems that CBS is well aware of the online fans yet they continue to depend on Nielsen's. In an article yesterday Leslie Moonves is quoted as saying he wants Jericho viewers in front of the TV because that's how CBS gets paid. This man needs to get a clue. We are in front of the TV and we've gathered many new viewers so CBS needs to make sure they're counted. They won't be as long as this reliance upon Nielsen continues.
Our Jericho board even got nominated for an Emmy. We're the best free advertising CBS could get.

Very interesting article and the extra lenghts you went to in order to get the WHOLE picture is greatly appreciated. I totally agree that all viewers need to be counted.

Skeet Ulrich was the reason I tuned in to the show. He is a phenomenal actor, and when he first came on the scene 12 years ago, he was touted as a virtuoso. He has matured and grown as an actor even more so than his contemporaries and deserves a freaking emmy, especially for the dramatic season finale. Old stereotypes are the refuge for the ill-informed.

Thank you so much, your article gives me hope that the networks might eventually realize having viewers sitting in front of a tv viewing there show live is not the be all end all it once was. This is not the 1950's or 1960's we have all this new technology that allows us to view shows at times that are more convenient for us. I would certainly think that someone at some network will finally come up with a way to count all their viewers. I would love to know what the criteria are for being a neilson family. Father works 9 to 5 Mom stays home and fixes dinner to be served by 5:30 so we can all sit down in front of our tv's in time for prime time television. No taping, no dvr, no Tivo, no ON Demand, just you in your chair in front of the tv. Thankfully, Nina Tassler seems to realize there is a bigger picture. Unfortunatly, Mr. Moonves, is her boss. That would be "CLUE"LES Moonves.

I sure hope Les Moonves and Nina Tassler read this because I LOVE JERICHO!!!
I don't watch online and I am not a Nielsen family, so I never get counted. NOT FAIR!!
I never missed an episode of JERICHO yet!

JERICHO ROCKS!! WATCH IT! You'll LOVE it!!
I PROMISE!!

Thanks for the article - I have been fascinated by this story (although I should admit, I've also been a participant). One thing to also take into consideration is that your numbers take into account those internet views that can be monetized by CBS - but because you are only looking at the 'official' cbs.com site, you aren't really seeing the full impact of the online audience. For example, over 100,000 fans signed a petition, and the self-proclaimed 'Jericho Rangers' have created countless sites to fuel the fan movement. Some of the most popular (no, I don't run any of these) are jericholives.com and jerichorallypoint.com.

Nice post Zach. I agree that the Nielsen ratings system is broken, and getting more broken. However, it's not AS broken as most people think. It exists to measure investment in TV advertisements - not the popularity of TV programs. These things used to be one in the same, these days they are diverging - as you point out. My guess is the divergence hasn't yet reached a point whereby the monetization of the non-TV audience comes close to making up for the shortfall in TV audience ratings revenue. Why is that? Interested to hear your thoughts (if you agree).

Completely agree. But it's a bit of a conundrum for the networks. The real value in a fanatical fan is that they consume (or are prepared to pay to consume) more of the content. But as long as the networks try and monetize shows based on advertised product consumption (ultimately), they never tap into that real value.

Let's see... 100,000 fanatical Jericho fans each paying $1.50 for one of a 10 episode season... $1.5M. Hmmm... if they paid Skeet what he is actually worth - $10/show - they should be able to break even :)

I believe the issue here is much more fundamental than network programming decisions and Neilsen ratings. The “broadcasting” technology and business model is a mass market medium which places value on aggregating large, demographically identifiable audiences.

The ultimate users of Neilsen data are the media buyers, and by extension the product advertisers. They are usually much more interested in how the ratings break down at the gender/age level. For example, when Chevrolet wants to advertise the Silverado pickup truck, they are probably going to want to target Males aged 18-34. They might concentrate their media buy on “Monday Night Football,” for instance, rather than spreading it out over many fragments of their target audience, even if those fragments are equally loyal and reliable viewers of other respective programs.

Compare this to the Google model, where the smallest advertiser can pinpoint a potential base of customers for their customers in a precise and predictable way by using contextual ad placement.

The other fundamental problem for broadcasters is that loyalty alone is almost impossible to monetize unless it is highly popular and can be franchised (“Law and Order” for example). The ancillary revenue that networks receive from web sites and merchandise are miniscule compared to the dollars that advertisers will pay to reach a large television audience.

In the first table, the second column is labelled "Website audience / TV audience", but the values in the columns are percents. This doesn't make sense to me- does 5.5% mean there were 5.5 times as many web viewers as tv viewers, or only 5% of the number of tv viewers used were website viewers? It's a big difference!

A scatterplot of web audience vs tv audience would also be useful, especially if supplemented with some reference lines (eg. 2x 5x 10x)