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Ratings from the 80's

Paul Raven

By Paul Raven
in DTS: Cancelled Soaps

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j swift Grand Master

j swift

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You are far from ignorant for asking a question - it stands for ANalysis Of VAriance.

The problem with published ratings is that they only report the average.  But, if you measure an effect, you need to prove the change over time exceeds chance.  For example, if during the course of a month the weekly ratings for Guiding Light go and up and down by 300 viewers each week, then any change week to week within 300 is just chance, because that is what we expect.  However, an ANOVA table calculates how much change would need to be observed to go beyond chance. 

Just like if you flip a coin twice and get tails once, that can be explained by the fact the there is a 50/50 chance of getting tails, but how many times do you have to observe getting tails in a row, before you could determine that there was something tricky about the coin.  Or, a child's height naturally grows over time, but how much height would they need to grow before you would fear that they'll be a giant.  As an analogy, the rating only report the height, they don't report the chance that the difference in height this week was expected because all children grow a few millimeters each week. 

Nielson doesn't publish the variance for the public, so you would need to calculate it yourself, because they are in the business of selling that data to the networks and ad agencies, and if they published it every week for free, nobody would pay for their ratings reports.

In this case, the change in audience numbers between June and July did not exceed the expected week-to-week change to the degree that we could determine that DAYS's New Orleans remote had an actual positive effect on the viewership.  Because they gained as many viewers as one would expect by chance.

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JAS0N47 Veteran

JAS0N47

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A human glitch!  I guess I forgot to sort that week's ratings. I've replaced the chart above and posted the correct one now. I'm sure that will happen again when dealing with a decade of ratings, so if anyone notices I forget to sort a week, let me know.

FROM THE VAULT: WEEKLY DAYTIME NIELSEN RATINGS: WEEKS OF 3/9/81-3/13/81 & 3/16/81-3/20/81:

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Contessa Donatella Grand Master

Contessa Donatella

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Well, Doug Marland's writing was the set-up. ABC Daytime Head asked Agnes who to get to write GH & she recommended Doug, with good reason. Then she promoted Gloria Monty as everyone knows. But, she made many many changes in production, shorter scenes, more edits, cross-cutting, going out of the studio, etc. Then there was the actors with golden chemistry & yes absolutely teen Genie! So right place, right time, the spirit of desperation driving them, voila, magic. 

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