Channel surfing is essential to the television viewing experience, especially as the number of channels and the volume of programming on television explodes.  Following from the explosion of television content, viewers’ ability to discover new programs is impaired and their estimation of the opportunity costs of choosing a program is increased.

At Simulmedia, we think that certain viewers will spend less time surfing if they were better informed of program content and schedules.  We also think that, through segmenting viewers by their surfing habits, we might better identify the viewers that will surf less and tune in more after exposure to the right program promotions.  Scheduling promotions in spots that index highly for viewers likely to enter favorable surfing modes will encourage their substituting viewing time for surfing time and increase the ratings of the programs they choose.

To investigate surfing behavior further we tapped into data from Twitter, where dozens of people announce to the world that they are channel surfing every day.  Unlike traditional ratings or second-by-second set-top-box information, Twitter has rich qualitative information that reveals motivations behind viewers’ surfing.

A semantic analysis of the data revealed that the tweets could be clustered into 8 distinct channel surfing modes. Each of these modes represents a different state-of-mind, which in turn could correspond to receptivity to program promotion. The modes are listed below:

1. Anticipation - composed of people who tweeted about surfing as they waited for a program to start. For example, “channel surfing waiting until 3pm when ellen comes on!“.

2. Searching – composed of people who indicated that they were searching for something to watch. For example “Channel surfing . looking for some good cable tv“.

3. Multi-tasking – composed of people who were doing other things besides surfing and twittering. For example “Channel surfing and reading Roenick’s latest comments on how he thinks Babcock hates Cheli..“.

4. Split-attention - composed of people who distribute their attention between several programs at once. For example “Channel surfing between Idol and Lakers“.

5. About to sleep - composed of people who are just biding time by channel surfing before they fall asleep. For example “channel surfing, probably til I fall asleep.”.

6. Relaxing - composed of people who have indicated that they were in a relaxed state of mind and were channel surfing. For example “Plans fell through so chillaxing n channel surfing“. 

7. Bored & Awake - composed of insomniacs who are bored, and are surfing in the hope they fall asleep soon. For example “Channel surfing because I can’t sleep…..”

8. Converts - composed of people who found something to watch while surfing. For example, “Channel surfing and found last 15 mins of Penn State trouncing Stanford in the Championship game in women’s college#rugby on ESPNU“.

We’d expect viewers in different modes to respond differently to program promotion.  Of the eight surfing modes, Anticipation and Split-attention are likely the most difficult to sway with promotions.  Viewers in Anticipation mode surf to kill time before a scheduled program.  Viewers in the Split-attention mode are watching multiple channels at the same time.

On the other end of the discovery spectrum, we’d expect viewers in the Searching and Converting mode, roughly 30% of classified tweets, to be most likely to change their surfing time to watching time.  Directing promotions to viewers who are in Searching and Converting modes presents a untapped opportunity to increase ratings and also provide better media choices to these viewers.

Darwin postulated that competition for limited food resources led to the single finch population on the island to diverge into 13 different species. Each species adapted to specialize on a different food source – resulting in the evolution of different beak shapes that we see today.

At Simulmedia, we think that TV networks face similar pressures as they compete for a share of increasingly scarce audience attention.  These pressures force networks to focus on attracting specific audiences.

We tested our hypothesis by adapting the Audience Attentiveness framework we introduced in an earlier post.  To recap, the Y-axis represents Attentiveness, measured as the average network minutes viewed during primetime per viewer, the X-axis represents the Relative Segment Reach which is the percentage of audience segment viewing primetime on that network, and the area of the bubbles represents the number of total network primetime viewers within each segment.

We predicted that broadcast networks should have programming that caters to a wide variety of audiences – intuitively, the only way they could maintain their large reach.  As a result broadcast networks should have audiences distributed across all four quadrants of the Simulmedia Attentiveness chart.

Cable networks, like the finches, should show signs of specialization.  We should see a small cluster of audiences with high attentiveness and high reach in the upper-right quadrant with the rest of the audiences clustering towards the center.  Data was extracted for February 2009 by applying Simulmedia Audience Segments© on the TNS InfosysTV system.

As predicted, the cable networks we sampled displayed various degrees of specialization (see charts below). Their charts showed a cluster of audiences separate from the others in the top-right quadrant.  ESPN, as expected, with its exclusive focus on sports tends to be an extreme case of specialization as seen by the Basketball Fans.

Spike, although not as extreme as ESPN, tends to have relatively higher segment reach and attentiveness into the Remote Detective audiences; whereas for Discovery the core audiences are TV Naturalists and Reality Watchers.

Among the broadcast networks, while audiences interacted with NBC as predicted – relatively equal distribution across the four quadrants – CBS and ABC had remarkably different patterns. CBS and to a lesser extent ABC’s audiences aligned themselves almost perfectly in a straight line.

We think this indicates that CBS and ABC have adopted an audience acquisition strategy focused on niche audiences.  Their attentiveness charts look somewhere between a traditional broadcast network and a cable network.  This slight tilt towards specialization seems to have worked as both have beat NBC (when one excludes the Super Bowl) in the ratings game.

In conclusion, we think that TV Networks are adopting a range of audience acquisition strategies.  Cable networks continue to specialize on small niche audiences. Some such as ESPN are hyper-specialized focusing exclusively on sports audiences, whereas Discovery and Spike Cable networks show a lesser degree of specialization.  Surprisingly, broadcast networks are also showing signs of specialization as illustrated by CBS and ABC; however others such as NBC continue to execute on the traditional model.

As for the finches, they continue to evolve 150 years after their discovery by Darwin. National Geographic reports that “Since the arrival of the Large Ground Finch in 1982 on the island of Daphne the Medium Ground Finch, a long-time Daphne resident has evolved to have a smaller beak-apparently as a result of direct competition with the larger bird for food.”

Thoughts welcome….

*Thanks to Jeff Storan and Stewart Hauser for their help with the data visualizations.