May 12-16, 2008

[dragonflies]

I thought so! I thought I remembered Errol or Toupsy posting something about overall ratings and I remember GH having lost alot more in a year than AMC or OLTL

[DevotedToAMC]

yay to AMC rising!

[Soapfan1]

Monday May 12 2008

1.Y&R 3.8/5,121,000

2.B&B 3.0/4,184,000

3.DAYS 2.2/3,037,000

4.ATWT 2.2/3,027,000

5.GH 2.3/2,976,000

6.OLTL 2.2/2,654,000

7.AMC 2.2/2,628,000

8.GL 1.8/2,486,000

Tuesday May 13 2008

1.Y&R 3.7/5,244,000

2.B&B 2.9/3,954,000

3.ATWT 2.1/2,921,000

4.DAYS 2.1/2,905,000

5.GH 2.3/2,862,000

6.OLTL 2.2/2,643,000

7.AMC 2.1/2,592,000

8.GL 1.7/2,544,000

Wednesday May 14 3008

1.Y&R 3.7/5,057,000

2.B&B 2.7/3,760,000

3.GH 2.2/2,855,000

4.DAYS 2.1/2,718,000

5.ATWT 2.0/2,711,000

6.OLTL 2.1/2,706,000

7.AMC 2.0/2,609,000

8.GL 1.6/2,123,000

Thursday May 15 2008

1.Y&R 3.5/5,035,000

2.B&B 2.7/3,806,000

3.GH 2.3/3,032,000

4.DAYS 2.1/2,852,000

5.OLTL 2.2/2,830,000

6.ATWT 1.9/2,763,000

7.AMC 2.0/2,572,000

8.GL 1.6/2,444,000

Friday May 16 2008

1.Y&R 3.5/4,872,000

2.B&B 2.4/3,640,000

3.DAYS 2.2/3,052,000

4.GH 2.3/3,041,000

5.OLTL 2.1/2,724,000

6.ATWT 1.9/2,635,000

7.AMC 1.9/2,448,000

8.GL 1.7/2,288,000

I DID THE RATING BY THE MOST VIEWERS

[MarkH]

People here are blaming CBS' fall on Y&R's fall.

Yeah, maybe (if you ignore that historical trend stuff I've been trying to push :-) ).

But what about The Price Is Right? It is no longer in the daytime, top 5 right.

I think Bob Barker's retirement and Bill Bell's death were fundamental turning points. Yet, as soon as I say that, I think "nah...we've been headed here since 1952, and no one thing is responsible for any of it".

[AddictedToSoaps]

GO OLTL!!!

[TC]

Why 1952?

[MarkH]

If you look upthread, and especially last week's ratings, you'll see charts documenting the (household) ratings trends for soaps since the the 1952-1953 season.

What those charts show is that, almost from the beginning, soap ratings were on a steady linear or even curvilinear decline.

So, the declining ratings are NOT a recent phenomenon. They have ALWAYS been declining (in the aggregate). It is only recently that most of them are low.

[TC]

Thank you Mark.

The difference from then compared to now is profit.

[TC]

Pride goeth before a fall.

[P.J.]

TPIR nighttime specials seem to be doing okay....not stellar, but okay. Does anyone know TPIR's ratings since Drew took over?

[AddictedToSoaps]

I'm curious about that as well.

[MarkH]

Hi: Here are two more data figures, and then I'll stop okay :-).

But SouthofSoaps' questions yesterday (about autocorrelation) and Sylph's (about Markov process) raised for me a question that I really do wonder about:

"To what extent do the fates of the soaps travel together?". In other words, we see all those lines heading - ahem - south of soaps :-). Down down down. Yet the trajectories aren't always perfectly in lockstep.

Are there some soaps whose rise-and-fall depends more on others?

To answer that, I did two things.

The first table here (sorry for the resolution, but it is an SPSS export) shows the simple ratings correlations (from 1952-2007 seasons, where available) for the eight remaining US daytime soaps. That is a lot of numbers, but it says that, on average, the trajectories of soaps ARE correlated. (I could go into so much technical detail, and estimate these so much more precisely...but this is good for a bird's eye view). What you'll also see, though, is that some trajectories are more correlated than others.

So, the second table does a factor analysis on the trajectory correlations. (This is something called a T-technique factor analysis). And this surprised me, because two distinct trajectory groups emerged. (They're not THAT distinct...the two trajectories are correlated about 0.6). I thought, then, these groups would be sorted by network, right? In other words, we'd see that the ABC soaps travel in lockstep, the CBS soaps travel in lockstep...and who knows where Days would fall?

It turns out that is not what happened. The ABC soaps and Y&R/B&B represent one group, and Days + P&G soaps represent another group. (You can see this by examining the "structure" coefficients...ABC plus Y&R/B&B have their highest structure loadings on the first factor, Days + P&G have their highest structure loadings on Factor 2).

Could these be the "winner" and "loser" trajectories?

Pondering the results, I think these different trajectory groupings reflect the fact that (long-run) P&G and Days have experienced more overall decline (from their origins) than ABC/Y&R-B&B. In other words, I suspect that the soaps have been split out by how hard they have fallen.

As a final note...the fact that the two trajectory groupings are correlated 0.6 means that everyone is falling :-). It's not like any soap is immune. But it DOES suggest, from a process perspective, that the three soaps that are on the docket for most immediate cancellation (P&G and Days) ARE more similar in terms of their ratings loss functions than the other soaps. Maybe there is method to all this cancellation talk?

[MichaelGL]

Yay!!!! OLTL rose!!

Last week was truly amazing. Every soap writer should be taking notes from RC, he knows how to write a soap.

[SouthOfSoap]

MarkH, thanks for all the excellent analysis - much appreciated