How The Internet is Growing Traditional TV Audience Figures
After all the hoohay saying that the internet is killing tv, could it in fact be the opposite. Is the internet helping old school tv grow?
Viewing figures for TV events have been growing. From the winter olympics to the Grammies and the super bowl events have been attracting their biggest audiences figures for decades. And now television executives are begrudgingly thanking the Internet for its change in fortune.
A lot of it is thanks to social networking sites.The Nielsen Company reported that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the internet while they watched. A quick post saying ‘Wow, look at that cool costume” or “You gotta see this” can literally bring thousands of visitors to a show due to the viral nature of these networks.
“The Internet is our friend, not our enemy,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which broadcast both the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards this year. “People want to be attached to each other.”
“People want to have something to share,” Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC Universal, said from Vancouver. He said the effects of online conversations were “important for all big event programming, and also, honestly, for all of television going forward.”
If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room or something like it.
The Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, mounted a digital campaign to promote the awards show this year, signing up Facebook fans and monitoring Grammy-related Twitter messages.
Peter Anton, the academy’s vice president for digital media, said it was not a coincidence that the awards show notched a 35% gain over last year’s audience figures.
“increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings,” said Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen. He said the Olympic data showing simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience.
TV companies are now working to incorporate the ‘web effect’ for more television shows. For the Olympics, NBC is promoting something called “You Be the Judge,” which lets viewers submit their own scores for figure skaters through a Web application and compare their scores to other viewers. The network’s Web site also features a gadget that tracks Twitter tweets about the event.
Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships for Twitter, said sites like Twitter let people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation.
“In the future, I can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself,” Ms. Sladden said.
So if your a fan of a failing show, get on Twitter and Facebook, tell the world how great it is, and you may, with your thousands of friends save the day and the show.
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[...] A lot of it is thanks to social networking sites.The Nielsen Company reported that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the internet while they watched. A quick post saying ‘Wow, look at that cool costume” or “You gotta see this” can literally bring thousands of visitors to a show due to the viral nature of these networks. View the Original article [...]