CBS Research to Release Daily L7 Projections Alongside Live Plus Same Day Ratings
Move Reflects Continued Industry Shift Toward L7 and C7—A More Accurate Measurement of a Show’s Total Audience and Full Monetization Value
CBS today announced that effective with the start of the 2014-2015 television season (Sept. 22), the Network will supplement its daily Nielsen preliminary fast affiliate ratings with Live + 7-Day rating projections, marking a further shift toward a metric that better reflects the total audience and monetization value of its programming.
“L7 and C7 are the metrics that more accurately account for how viewers watch our shows and how we get paid for our programming – both in advertising and content licensing,” said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. “C7 deals were a significant part of our Upfront negotiations this year, and we are doing more and more C7 deals all of the time. As new technologies continue to improve audience measurement across all platforms, these more precise metrics are becoming the industry standard, benefitting advertisers and content providers alike.”
“To report audience results for programs the day after they air live is comparable to reporting the results of a baseball game after the fifth inning,” said David Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President, CBS VISION. “The only way to accurately compare the audiences across all programs is to include more time-shifted viewing. In order to enable the timely analysis of each day’s television viewing, we will develop Live+ 7-Day projections for each of our programs based on the distinctive historical increases in viewers for each program. For new programs, these projections will initially be based on the time-shifting pattern of programs in the same genre until we have actual results for them over a seven-day time frame.”
CBS will release daily L7 projections in viewers, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 that will include percentage increases over each program’s live plus same day averages. The L7 ratings will supplement each morning's release of the Network’s preliminary fast affiliate ratings along with individual program and nightly rating highlights.
Following is an example of CBS's new ratings reporting method, using the Network's Tuesday, May 6, 2014 broadcasts. It features both actual fast affiliate national ratings for the broadcasts as well as the more representative total Live +7 ratings as estimated by CBS Research.
EXAMPLE (Ratings for Tuesday, May 6, 2014)
With time-shifted viewing expected to further increase this season, live plus same day ratings will continue to significantly undercount a program's overall viewership. Since official Nielsen L7 ratings are unavailable until three weeks after broadcast, projected L7 ratings will give an immediate and representative picture of a program's total audience and demographics.
Last season, two network programs had 7-day viewer lifts of more than four million (“The Blacklist,” THE BIG BANG THEORY), 14 programs had lifts of more than three million viewers and 39 programs saw increases of more than two million viewers.
Move Reflects Continued Industry Shift Toward L7 and C7—A More Accurate Measurement of a Show’s Total Audience and Full Monetization Value
CBS today announced that effective with the start of the 2014-2015 television season (Sept. 22), the Network will supplement its daily Nielsen preliminary fast affiliate ratings with Live + 7-Day rating projections, marking a further shift toward a metric that better reflects the total audience and monetization value of its programming.
“L7 and C7 are the metrics that more accurately account for how viewers watch our shows and how we get paid for our programming – both in advertising and content licensing,” said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. “C7 deals were a significant part of our Upfront negotiations this year, and we are doing more and more C7 deals all of the time. As new technologies continue to improve audience measurement across all platforms, these more precise metrics are becoming the industry standard, benefitting advertisers and content providers alike.”
“To report audience results for programs the day after they air live is comparable to reporting the results of a baseball game after the fifth inning,” said David Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President, CBS VISION. “The only way to accurately compare the audiences across all programs is to include more time-shifted viewing. In order to enable the timely analysis of each day’s television viewing, we will develop Live+ 7-Day projections for each of our programs based on the distinctive historical increases in viewers for each program. For new programs, these projections will initially be based on the time-shifting pattern of programs in the same genre until we have actual results for them over a seven-day time frame.”
CBS will release daily L7 projections in viewers, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 that will include percentage increases over each program’s live plus same day averages. The L7 ratings will supplement each morning's release of the Network’s preliminary fast affiliate ratings along with individual program and nightly rating highlights.
Following is an example of CBS's new ratings reporting method, using the Network's Tuesday, May 6, 2014 broadcasts. It features both actual fast affiliate national ratings for the broadcasts as well as the more representative total Live +7 ratings as estimated by CBS Research.
EXAMPLE (Ratings for Tuesday, May 6, 2014)
With time-shifted viewing expected to further increase this season, live plus same day ratings will continue to significantly undercount a program's overall viewership. Since official Nielsen L7 ratings are unavailable until three weeks after broadcast, projected L7 ratings will give an immediate and representative picture of a program's total audience and demographics.
Last season, two network programs had 7-day viewer lifts of more than four million (“The Blacklist,” THE BIG BANG THEORY), 14 programs had lifts of more than three million viewers and 39 programs saw increases of more than two million viewers.
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Still new to all the ratings lingo (even after reading the ratings article a few months ago)...does this mean that they will also be including people who watch online or is it still just DVR?
ReplyDeleteJust DVR
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, this will still be only DVR. I'm not sure if they currently have a way to accurately measure a show's online views. I don't know a whole lot about how the ratings work either, but I can at least tell you what I do know so that you'll have an idea of how to interpret them. As far as the 18-49 demo rating goes, a 2.0 - 2.5 is decent. Anything 3.0 or above is great.1.5 - 1.9 is getting worse. Below a 1.5 and the show is in real trouble. As for the viewers, I consider anything 10 million and above to be just fine. Below 10 million, the lower the worse. For the 25-54, I don't know much at all as I'm not used to seeing that one. I can't imagine it works very differently. Also, the various networks treat the ratings a little differently. For instance, shows with low ratings can survive for a lot longer on the CW than on the big 4 networks. For the CW, I think around a 1.0 is decent in the 18-49. The numbers I gave above are most accurate networks that expect decent viewership, like CBS and ABC. Those are the big 2. Fox and NBC are still part of the big 4, but they're not quite as big as CBS and ABC.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised CBS is the first network to come up with this, but I'm glad they do.
ReplyDeleteI would understand if it was the C7 numbers but whats the point in predicting L+7 numbers? They dont reflect viewers who dont skip the ads. So this is just to make themselves feel/look better.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all the info! Come May 2015 I might wish I was still ignorant of all this though :-)
ReplyDelete