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Posted on August 4th, 2009 by Stewart Hauser
Program loyalty is not significantly affected by time-shifted viewing, according to a new analysis of live and recorded viewing behaviors for a national audience. Most viewers of a program still only watch one episode during a given season, and hence remain excellent targets of promotion.
Several months ago we examined program loyalty for live viewing within a specific geographic region and observed that less than half of a show’s viewers during a season, on average, will watch more than one episode of the show. Even American Idol, with its famously loyal fan base, has over a third of its ratings driven by viewers who will only watch one episode during the season. We concluded that these one-time viewers would be ideal targets for promotion.
The findings are similar when time-shifted viewing is incorporated into the analysis. Program loyalty, defined here as the percentage of a show’s viewers who watch at least two episodes during the season, is not affected much by time-shifted viewing. Some viewers move from the non-loyal to the loyal crowd when DVR data is counted, but there are other viewers excluded from the original analysis who suddenly become part of the non-loyal crowd in the new analysis. All in all, a show’s loyalty score is basically the same whether we include or exclude DVR data.
The graph below shows Average Tune-in plotted against Loyalty for a select group of programs. For each show, the blue dot represents live-only viewing, and the orange triangle represents live plus time-shifted viewing. Note that the orange triangles are always higher than the blue dots, since including the DVR data will always lead to higher tune-in. In terms of program loyalty, however, there is not a consistent trend whereby incorporating DVR data will always increase or always decrease the amount of loyalty to a show. As before, slightly less than 50% of a show’s viewers, on average, watched at least two episodes of a show during the season. American Idol once again has the most loyal fans, with around two-thirds of viewers watching at least two episodes this season. Rescue Me again has the least loyal following.
Note: Data from TNS Media Research’s DirecTView. Time period: All 2009 episodes of the show’s current season or most recently completed season. DVR viewing tracked for seven days following the original airing of each episode.
Stewart, interesting post.
Couple questions:
1. Have you graphed DVR and live users by # of episodes watched? Wondering if the average distribution looks the same. Thinking that super loyal would show up on DVR.
2. With the DVR recordings, does that include suggested recorded shows? Isn’t DirectTV powered by Tivo. Could that be skewing the data?
Thanks
Rob
Thanks Rob. The graph shows that the distribution of loyal viewers between DVR and Live varies by program. In some programs, such as Burn Notice and Top Chef, DVR watchers are more loyal than Live viewers. For other programs, such as American Idol, Live viewers are more loyal than DVR viewers.
The DVR data does include suggested recorded shows, but these suggestions are unlikely to skew the data, since TiVo powers only a small portion of DirecTV boxes, and also since on-air promotion, rather than suggested shows or other forms of promotion, remains the most effective medium for making viewers aware of programming.
[...] A previous blog post looked at program loyalty and concluded that “low loyalty” viewers (people who watch only one episode during the season) would be ideal targets of promotion. Most shows have large numbers of low loyalty viewers, as shown in the table below. The implication was that these one-time watchers had attention that was “for sale,” and that effective promotions could increase the number of episodes that they watch. [...]