TV Viewership Plummets?

[purejuice]

There's an ungankable graph in today's NYT -- http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/01/17/business/17nbc_g.html -- in the middle of the left column -- showing the decline, starting in the 1950s, of network TV viewership. I emphasize the 50s, because cable does not seem to be the factor here. NBC primetime viewership -- similar to that of CBS -- has plummeted from a high, apparently, of 30 mill in 1950, nearly halved to 18 mill in 1960, with slight zigs and zags but consistently moving downward through the decades to 5 mill in 2010, with CBS, ABC and Fox, debuting in the early 90s, all in the under-10-mill tank.
This is big.

I wonder if movie viewership has plummeted similarly?

What are people doing instead? What did they start doing in the middle 1950s to cause such a huge 10 mill drop in prime time viewership, which declined consistently previous to the invention of cable, Fox and the net, and at a consistent rate after?

And, why is no one discussing the saccharine cultural ripoff by Cameron of cartoon Navajo? I have tried to get the Navajo at KWRK interested, and will have to try again.
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/01/navajo-filmmaker-arlene-bomwn-avatar.html
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100111/ap_on_en_mo/us_avatar_racism
http://www.essence.com/entertainment/hot_topics/does_sci-fi_blockbuster_avatar_have_a_ra.php

Comments

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

There has actually been some good discussion online about Avatar's racism (my favorite quip: retitling it "Dances With Smurfs"), but I think on the whole, the "what these colored people need is a honky" plot is tired enough that it hasn't generated a lot of energy in responses outside of already-activist circles.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

oh god. as one of the many native americans who works with me at kwrk put it, when i said, "you are a survivalist," --IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE FOR AN INDIAN TO BE???

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Unrelatedly: Cherchez le guido.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

a guido in grey velvet pants and a turtleneck just might could be the end of me. yes, please.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

You should be able to link the graphic at
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/01/17/business/17nbc_g.html

It looks like overall TV viewership stayed pretty steady between 1960 and 1980. I do wonder what that drop between 1955 and 1960 was about.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

This graphic shows no drop between 1955 and 1960. What you see in the second half of the 1950s is ABC gaining market share from NBC and CBS. In 1955 NBC and CBS each have about 25M viewers and ABC has about 13M, for a total of 63M. In 1960, they're all bouncing around the 20M mark, for an eyeballed total of 58M. That size of drop--a few million maybe?--could be explained by something as simple as the 1958-1959 recession or the cancellation of a few popular shows.

All of the networks show drops in the 1953-1955 range, but if I've learned nothing else in my time I've learned not to trust the two or three data points at the start of a time series, especially if they date from when the data-gathering method was itself new.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

so you'd argue the persistent downward turn is due to competition first from abc then fox? assuming that the NYT is not making this all up, of course.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

No, I would not. I make no argument about the persistent downturn. I was just trying to point out a design fail in the NYT's graphic.

They are trying to show two things: first, that NBC's ratings have fallen faster than the other major networks' in recent years, and that they have tended to trail the other networks in ratings. The second graph makes the second point well: it simply reports the difference in NBC's and the lead network's ratings over time, thus erasing any secular trend in the level of their ratings.

The first graph does not make the first point well at all.

After the introduction of cable, if a viewer stops watching one of the major networks, they are doing one of three things: watching non-network TV (i.e., cable), watching another network, or not watching TV. It's quite possible for viewers of the three major networks to switch to cable (or no TV at all) in equal proportions, which gives you periods in that graph like 1995-2000, when all three networks' ratings went down simultaneously. At the same time, the Big Three's total ratings fell, from roughly 11 million to roughly 9 million each. We wouldn't treat these drops as evidence that fewer people are watching TV, though, because we know that there's another line that the NYT doesn't show on the graph: the combined ratings of the other channels. (This is a Bad Thing.)

As you point out, there is no cable in the 1950s. Therefore if a viewer stops watching one of the major networks, they are doing one of two things: watching another network or not watching TV. You (reasonably) looked at the 1950s in that graph and saw a decline in network TV viewership. This is based, I presume, on the downward slope of NBC and CBS in those years. But notice that ABC is trending upward. There is a bit of a decline in the total viewers between 1955 and 1960, but most of the action appears to be viewers switching from NBC and CBS to ABC. That's why comparing the total viewership of the three networks, as I did above (~63M in 1955, about 58M in 1960), is important.

Notice also the 1960s, where the networks' ups and downs tend to mirror each other.