Reconfiguring the “Hits”: The New Portrait of Television Program Success in an Era of Big Data

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of evolving conceptions of the audience by analyzing television’s “hits” as portrayed by two market information regimes: traditional Nielsen ratings and social television analytics, a supplementary big data approach to audience measurement. In doing so, this work provides insight into the types of content that perform well under a social television analytics regime based on audience engagement relative to those that succeed under the traditional ratings regime based on audience exposure. As such, this article addresses the changes and challenges fostered by an era of big data and contributes both to the management scholarship on media industries, as well as to the audience behavior literature by expanding upon the relationship between television ratings, media management, and the implications for cultural production.

Notes

1. http://www.nielsensocial.com/about/

^2. NTTR provide information on four metrics including unique audience, impressions, Tweets, and unique authors (used to rank programs for this analysis). For more information, visit: http://en-us.nielsen.com/sitelets/cls/documents/nntv/NNTV-NielsenTwitterTVRatings-FAQ.pdf

^3. This accounted for 103 discarded slots from traditional ratings—mostly over the summer when production of new series is less common and sports playoff games are more prominent.

^4. The 16 genre categories represented include: comedy, crime drama, documentary, drama, historical drama, horror, musical comedy, news, newsmagazine, pro wrestling, reality, sitcom, special event, suspense, talk, and TV movie.

^5. It is worth noting that while HHI is the quantitative metric of choice for representing media market diversity, there are indeed other normative and ideological models (see Freedman, 2014 for a thorough review of the various perspectives).

^6. Chart placement for the drama genre includes suspense, horror, crime, and historical dramas.