All: Changing The Focus Of The Show

[All My Shadows]

I still stand by my belief that the #1 reason for soaps' ratings going south is the lack of people who are at home during the daytime, closely followed by the fact that there are a zillion channels to watch now as opposed to just three in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

[MarkH]

We have a winner!

AND soaps are an old brand. Most of them belong to our mothers and grandmothers. So they're just not cool. I don't care if OLTL has all kinds of pop stars, the brand itself is uncool. That's why young people aren't coming to see them. Young people also aren't watching Hallmark or TVLand (at least not as originally conceived).

ETA: Think Lawrence Welk.

[JackPeyton]

without a doubt the nosedive of soaps in the past 15 years or so is 75% because of people being home less. Also, with parents home less with kids kids are not exposed to the soaps, therefor losing new audiance.

i really dont think soaps are as little watched as they seem, if we were to count unique watchers on tv, internet, soapnet, and youtube i think we would have a MUCH larger volume, let alone if everyone in america was counted. however none of that maters because ratings are there for one reason- advertisers. advertisers dont care who watches on youtube. rhwy just dont, and they shouldnt.

unless they get into product placement, and soaps are awful at it. 90210 pulled it off really well last season tho.

[cara mia]

I think people have quit soaps because prime-time shows have become so soapy. You can get your soap fix by watching GH or by watching Grey's Anatomy. Even comedies will use cliff-hangers, like Friends famously did on several occasions. In order for soaps to compete with the prime-time shows, they need to offer a depth of characterization that a prime-time show can't offer. That's why I've been so down Y&R's latest plot twists, especially when it comes to characters I've watched for a long time -- like Sharon, Jack and Nick. I just don't feel like I know them anymore.

[DRW50]

Lawrence Welk ceased production (at least on a massive scale) almost 30 years ago, but soaps were nearing their peak in ratings and in pop culture then. At that time, even though soaps were often seen as fuddy-duddy, they were very popular on college campuses. Soaps like AMC, the Monty GH, Y&R, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, they'd pushed soaps into a younger bracket and many younger people seemed interested. Soaps managed to reinvent themselves for a new era in the mid to late 70s.

I think soaps just stopped knowing how to appeal to new viewers. Their efforts only made the freefall worse, because they thought appealing to new viewers meant actively working to alienate old viewers, and assuming that casting young, bland, white faces while telling idiotic, extremely regressive storylines was the way to attract people. Soaps drifted along aimlessly during most of the 80s, until the early to mid 90s, when many of them became increasingly unwatchable because of their desperation to attain some type of hipness which most viewers had no interest in. That was also the era when soaps really began to start homogenizing and lost their individual identities. Everything became the same. Everything had to be a wannabe of JER's DAYS, or of primetime.

[Dan]

Hey Mark, I do love the graphs; however, I do have one comment to make in general. All of the graphs measure the health of daytime via the average rating point. But is that *really* an accurate measure of daytime's health or lack thereof? After all, a ratings point in 1952 is weighed by a completely different scale when compared to a ratings point from today. Every year, Nielsen adds more and more households to the ratings point. So naturally, the ratings point is going to trend downward. It's simple arithmetic. What I would like to know is how the graph would look when using total viewers as its measurement. We can try to find out how much a ratings point was measured in each year and use that number to determine the number of households and use that. I say households because something tells me researching accurate "total viewer" counts going back to the 50s is going to be pretty difficult. I think we would find a much more surprisingly stable chart for most shows.

[All My Shadows]

*jumps up and down like a furious child*

I've been saying that in regards to MarkH's graphs for months!

[Dan]

Well, you know what they say. Great minds think alike, lol.

[MarkH]

I think you both have good points!

First of all, the main reason I use the HH rating is because it is what is readily available. For many years, the translation between rating and # households/viewers is not available (to me anyway...for free, anyway). These ratings points are what float around, so they're sort of the best I can do.

But, also, I'm inclined to still like the rating. The reason has to do with the growing number of households. The rating adjusts for population expansion, and tells us something more like "the proportion of households" watching the soaps at any one point in time. The shrinking number still speaks to the relative viability of soaps, compared to other genres, etc.

That said, I'd probably pay $$ to get total-viewers for all these years (1952-present) . I'd love to plot them and compare the curves.

We do know that in recent years (say the last decade) for which # of viewers is more readily available, we still have a fairly clear linear decline.