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.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Unrelatedly: Cherchez le guido.

[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.