I guess it’s a reference question and therefore my job, but it comes from my boyfriend - he wants information on ratings for Saturday and Sunday morning shows (he’s working up a local kid’s show). He can’t find anything online and told me he was instructed to “try the local library”, which is me.
Well, I can find primetime ratings with no problem in our databases (Daily Variety, it seems) although I can’t actually view them because something about Acrobat Reader just shit the bed for me. Anyway. Are ratings for other parts of the TV schedule published anywhere? I can do interlibrary loan if necessary, just need to know where it is. Or is that one of those things that companies pay big money for?
Are you looking for local TV shows? Are you looking for the ratings themselves? Or information about how that is gathered?
For instance are you looking for the Zsofia Show which runs locally in Cleveland on M-F? And want to find the rating for that program?
Nielsen is a paid service, TV stations have to pay Nielsen to get numbers. They don’t give them out for free. This is how Nielsen makes money.
Since Nielsen is (basically) the only game in town, a TV station has to use their service. Well they don’t have to but to sell ad time, people buying it want to see the Nielsen rating so they can see how much to charge and if the price is worth it.
This is why your having trouble finding info. Since people pay for Nieslen numbers, Nielsen restricts who can give out such information.
I know I’m confusing you here, that’s why I was trying to figure out exactly what you want.
A TV station will pay more to Nielsen to get rating results overnight than if they get them weekly or monthly. You see a small indie TV station isn’t going to need them everyday for sales, while a big network station in a major urban area will.
And while all major markets have this service, I’m not sure all 200+ Nielsen markets have the ability for overnight ratings.
I would start by shooting an email to the program director of the TV station where the program airs and seeing if he is willing to give you rating numbers or information, or tell you where to find them.
But don’t be surprised if you’re shot down or not answered
Not local stuff - national is fine, we just need some sort of idea of how the trends in morning weekend programming are going. Not specific shows necessarily - partly, we need to decide whether we’re going to run our show on Saturday or Sunday morning. Also, we need to know when would be best to schedule it - what’s a good lead-in, what are kids watching.
You should also be thinking about what your competitors are doing and - especially if you’re after school aged kids - when the holidays are. Just going for the peak viewing time may not work for you because people might be very loyal to one programme. Sat and Sun morning kids shows (do you mean young people or children?) are unlikely to get as much loyalty as older programmes during the week but there’ll still be times where audiences drop out of a routine. For instance in the UK most new weekday dramas start at 9pm because people tend to be very habitual before then, unwilling to drop out of their routine programming to try new things. Then after 9 audiences start to look around the schedules for interesting things worth watching. Not sure if this will help you, or if you know all this already but just some thoughts!
there must be some reports/articles in the broadcast press you can find. Sorry I can’t be specific but I’m in the UK and don’t follow the US too closely. But over here I’d be looking at the Media Guardian website.
Kid-kids. Third graders, we’re thinking. The way things work in the US, as it’s been explained to me, is that the government requires broadcast stations to show a certain amount of children’s programming Saturday mornings. (Well, probably they have to show a certain amount and they do it on Saturday mornings.) The local station that wants us to do the show is willing to toss out one of the national Saturday shows, because they don’t make anything on them. Alternately, we can have a Sunday slot.
There are no such regulations. Stations program whatever they think is good for their audience. If they put children’s shows on Saturday mornings that’s only because they think children will be watching then. There used to be a requirement that stations broadcast a certain amount, three hours IIRC, of children’s educational shows a week, but nothing about when these had to be aired. I’m not sure if that rule still holds.
Same with publishing Nielsen ratings. The ones that have the most public interest get published. The real ratings, which are far more detailed, are proprietary.
If your boyfriend is working in television why can’t he get the ratings book from the station? Even if he’s working for an independent company, it would probably be easy to talk to the station you want to put it on and have them give you the trends. It’s in their best interests. I don’t understand your problem.
You’re correct the rule is a TV station must carry at least three hours of “educational and informative,” programing per channel per week. This is usually geered as kids but need not be.
It’s referred to as E/I and must have a bug in the corner when it’s aired (Like the networks put a bug in the lower right corner to show the channel)
For every subchannel the FCC requires this as well. So if WAAA-TV has a main channel and a sub channel that just broadcasts weather, they need 3 hours of E/I programming for each channel.
They don’t need to run the three hours on each channel. In the above channel they could run six hours of E/I programs on the main channel and nothing on the subchannel
There is a rule of when the programs must be aired
I don’t know where to look there, I would try looking around the HDTV forums. You’re gonna have to do some reading to find which area. There are a ton of forums over there.
The reason I refer the OP to them is a lot of TV industry people, well I should say LOCAL TV industry people read and participate. I don’t think the the OP will find an answer but that site may be able to give you some help where to look for what you need.
