Loyalty varies significantly across shows.  FOX’s American Idol has the most loyal audience in the sample, with 65% of viewers watching at least two episodes this season.  On the other end of the spectrum, just 26% of Rescue Me (FX) viewers watched at least two episodes of the show.  The average Loyalty Score in the sample was 46%, indicating that fewer half of viewers watched a given show more than once.

In other words, even for a show like American Idol with a perceived loyal and devoted following, over a third of the rating on a given night is driven by viewers who will not return for any additional episodes.  For less popular shows, the phenomenon is even more extreme.  Three-quarters of Rescue Me viewers, and two-thirds of Mad Men (AMC) viewers, watched exactly one episode this season.  As indicated in the previous loyalty post, these one-time viewers have attention that is “for sale” and are ideal targets of promotion.

Data from TNS Media Research’s InfoSysTV.  Time period: First episode of the show’s current season (or most recent season if the show is not running currently) through February 2009, except for Rescue Me, where time period is the first five episodes of the season that started in April 2009.  Reruns are not factored into the analysis.

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.