Why The CW doesn’t give a frickity frack about your “live” viewership
El Mayarah - we’re all in this mountain of salt together.
To start, we need to establish a couple of key points, and then I need to take you through Supergirl’s journey from CBS to The CW. Don’t let me lose you.
In marketing, as simply as I can say it, a metric is a way of measuring performance and operating statistics to track how you’re doing over time and how much closer it enables you to reach your goal.
In this specific instance, think of metrics as a number. Depending on the goal, the metrics chosen will depend on what sort of goal you want to achieve.
For instance, if your goal is to sell off the tallest tree, you would measure it by feet or meters. Height would be the metric you choose to measure whether or not your tree would be a successful sell.
If your goal was to sell the fruit from the tree, for simplicity’s sake, one of the metrics you’d choose to measure would be how much fruit the tree produces in pounds, bushelfuls, or whatever the fuck our lovely farmers do.
Still with me, yeah? Feelin’ good?
Goal: sell tree. Metric: height.
Goal: sell fruit. Metric: fruit yield.
How you define your goals/success will determine what metrics you use to measure it by.
Nielsen ratings are just another metric. It’s a way of calculating viewership that businesses use to determine “for X amount of dollars, how many people will see this commercial?” The number of viewers in the key demographic are generally more valuable than the total number of viewers.
For example, with a higher key demo, ABC was able to charge $419,000 per 30 second commercial sold during Grey’s Anatomy, compared to only $248,000 for a 30 second commercial during CSI, despite CSI having almost five million more viewers on average. (Source: BuddyTV)
Nielsen results are collected through little devices connected to televisions in select households (no, it’s not random, it doesn’t take into consideration public places TV is viewed like dorms or bars, it only recently started account for TiVo, and it currently lacks the capability to measure data for Internet streaming like Netflix and Hulu.) It also collects data through self-reported viewer “diaries”, which carries a certain amount of reporting bias, but that’s problem for another day.
Major networks like CBS measure the performances of their shows through Nielsen ratings (the traditional old school way) in order to determine how much they can charge for advertisements. In other words, CBS needs a show to maintain high ratings in order to generate more income.
But!!! That’s not all. Every show’s primary goal is to make it to 100 episodes. Once a show hits that number, it can be sold for syndication, and everyone who was involved in the production of that show receives residual checks (other networks will pay them to rerun the show on their own network). Super profitable because shows can be rerun for years.
CBS’s goal: have a show hit 100 episodes while looking like a big, juicy chunk of steak for advertisers. Primary metric: Nielsen ratings.
How close a show falls to hitting that 100 episode mark is what determines its renewal status. A show needs to consistently hit high ratings in order to justify the investment to keep chugging it along to the 100 episode mark. (You ever wonder why so many shows drag on past their expiration date? coughWarehouse13cough Hmm…)
So what happened with Supergirl on CBS? Supergirl fell when people lost faith in her.
(Sequart: Nicholas Yanes)
When it debuted on CBS, Supergirl rocked the ratings with a record high of 13 million viewers for the 2015-2016 season (Nielsen ratings at play!). But as you can see, it lost viewers at a steady pace. During the run of its first season, Supergirl went from 12.955 million to 5.995 million total viewers (-53.729%). It scored worse in its 18-49 key demographic dropping from 3.15 million to 1.3 million (-58.7%). CBS couldn’t justify keeping Supergirl when the time slot could be given to a show that could sustain a larger audience. Not only is Supergirl unable to maintain ratings, it’s taking up ad space.
Take a look at how Supergirl compared to other CBS shows during the 2015-2016 season. These ratings play an important part here, which is generally where people get the idea that boycotting a show that’s making choices they don’t agree with by not watching it live will be persuasive action.
Despite its ratings slide over seven years, The Good Wife still has higher ratings than Supergirl. The Good Wife premiered to an audience of 13.71 million viewers. And over the years it lost viewers as most shows do. It has lost so many viewers that its most recent episode, February 21st, 2016’s “Targets” only had an audience of 7.91 million. In contrast, Supergirl premiered to an audience of 12.95 million and is down to 6.69 in fourteen episodes. In other words, Supergirl has lost in just fourteen episodes the number of viewers it took The Good Wife seven seasons to lose.
Compounding this problem for Supergirl is the cost of ad space on her show […] a 30 second spot on NCIS is worth $151,738 and the same commercial time during Supergirl is worth $147,933. So while commercial time during NCIS and Supergirl are close in value, their audience sizes are completely different. For example, NCIS’s 15th episode for the 2015-2016 year was watched by 17.335 million viewers, Supergirl’s 15th episode 6.69 million people. This means that if someone were to pay to advertise on Supergirl, that product would be exposed to less than half the number of people watching NCIS. An examining of the 18 to 49 demographics reveals a similar problem. For the fifteenth episode of Supergirl and NCIS, Supergirl was watched by 1.39 million people between 18 and 49 while NCIS was watched by 2.32 million. When discussing the 18 to 49 demographic, this is a huge difference in viewership. [bolded my emphasis]
This leaves CBS with two options: sell advertising on Supergirl for half of what they can get from a different program or cancel the show and replace with something that has a better return on investment. (Sequart: Nicholas Yanes)
So yes, Nielsen ratings can determine the fate of your favorite show on a big network. The metric (Nielsen ratings) used to measure Supergirl’s success showed that Supergirl wouldn’t make the cut because CBS has a business model dependant on high ratings.
The CW plays by a different set of rules, and it doesn’t give a frickity frack about your live viewership. If you think you’re sending a strong message to The CW by boycotting watching it live or pointing to its ratings as proof that so-and-so storyline doesn’t work…you’re not. I’m really tired of seeing people use statistical data without context.
(This is what you’ve been waiting for, I know. Look at you, you’re halfway through this with me, I’m so proud.)
For those of you not in the know, The CW is the love child of CBS and Warner Bros., their partnership being an experimental way into the future of network TV business. As previously mentioned, Nielsen ratings fail to take into account how well shows are doing on streaming sites like Hulu, Netflix, or in-network streaming apps to watch shows on. As any marketer knows, a lack of data could potentially result in poor data-driven decisions! Misinformation, or lack of sufficient information, can lead you to the wrong conclusion!
The CW was set up to serve as a way for shows to make money through international sales and syndication, which now includes digital licensing (Hulu! Netflix! Amazon!). Advertising sales are a part of how The CW generates revenue, but not the biggest.
Here are a couple of quotes on how network executives view The CW.
“We’re a hybrid…We’re rooted in broadcast, but we’re also very rooted in the digital world. We’re a very unique premise in TV, and because of that we look at things differently.” - CW president Pedowitz
“The CW is the case in point where the back end is more important than the front end…The front end is still important — it’s still hundreds of millions of dollars in [advertising] revenue — but the amount of money you can make selling programming in secondary markets is becoming more important.” - CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves.
“Having a lot of the DC shows on The CW has allowed us the flexibility to cross-pollinate within the shows. That’s exciting and important for us…From a strategic perspective for Warner Bros., it doesn’t get much more important than DC.” - Warner Bros. chairman/CEO Kevin Tsujihara
In 2015, CBS averaged 10.91 million viewers per show, while The CW averaged 1.98. (Source: Tracking Board)
How does a network survive with such low ratings, you ask? By measuring its success through different metrics.
While other networks make money off of their live viewership, The CW was formed to serve as a launching platform for shows from its parent companies that will be more profitable through syndication (reruns) and digital licensing. Its goal is to get shows up to the 88-100 episode mark to be eligible to be sold. Not only do they count on The CW shows to be more profitable the second time around, the network only broadcasts programming created by NBC. They don’t pay any outside networks to run shows. Any money they make goes straight into their own pockets.
The CW’s goal: syndication. Metric: ???
If I had to take a guess, it’d be engagement? Fandom loyalty? Netflix insights? The longer and the more people talk about it, the greater the chance people will watch reruns, which in turn make those reruns more appealing to buy.
Take for example, Supernatural and its cult(-like) following:
“The talk now is that the show [Supernatural] will probably end with its 300th episode, an astounding number that would make it one of the most prolific and successful hour-long dramas in history. It is syndicated all over the world and an ongoing cash cow for its creators and the production company behind it: Warner Bros. TV. But it wouldn’t have lasted more than one season, perhaps two, on any other network, simply because its viewer numbers and ratings weren’t high enough. Even last year, in its 11th season on the air, it was the 158th ranked show in average viewers, with just 2.275 million per week, and scored just a 1.0 rating.”
Supernatural is basically free money at this point.
The CW knows its strengths. It’s not looking to compete with traditional television. It’s loading up with a niche they think is trending in the right direction, which at the moment happens to be superhero shows, and capitalizing on binge-watchers. In 2016, The CW and Netflix signed a deal that allowed Netflix to stream new seasons of each series just 8 days after their finale. Especially notable because it includes The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow.
Guess how much Netflix paid them for the digital licensing fee? Go ahead, guess.
One billion fucking dollars.
The deal lasts five years.
So how does Supergirl fall into this? In part, it’s because I’m fucking annoyed at petty ship wars using statistical data without the proper context, drawing wrong conclusions, AND LEADING OTHER PEOPLE TO THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS.
Now that you hopefully understand why shows on The CW can’t be measured by traditional Nielsen ratings, also understand this: whatever your reason for hanging onto Supergirl is…wherever it is you’re watching it off of live air in protest…you’re still telling the showrunners you’re interested in what they’re spoonfeeding you.
Unless you’re pirating or watching on illegal streaming sites.
tl;dr: if something doesn’t make financial sense on the surface, it most certainly does somewhere else.
Supergirl may have lost 67.35% of its total viewership and lost 53.31% of its key demographic but it’s still second only to The Flash on The CW, lol. Nielsen ratings are feedback to the network, but it doesn’t carry as much ultimative power as some people think it does when it comes to The CW.
In otherwards, vocally threatening to boycott new episodes of Supergirl because Karam*l is fucking toxic then going back to watch the good ol’ days of season one on Netflix is you biting yourself in the ass.
The best thing you can do is stop the petty ship war nonsense and tell the network why you fell in love with Supergirl in the first place. Positive reinforcement goes a long way. If all they hear is shipping nonsense screamed at them, they’re going to assume awful romance plots are the way to go.
Do something productive other than boycotting a show (when you’re not really because you’re still watching it on Netflix). Join the movement to bring back the show we love and free it from toxic influences.
Personally, I like @supergirliskarasstory. I think they have the right idea, and they’re a hell of a lot less crass than I am.
