Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-24732895-20140910035928/@comment-19765459-20140912012009

Paul.rea wrote: And again this "sub-economy" is miniscule when stood next to the actual entertainment industry.

FOX charges $400,000 for a :60 spot on average.

You can buy a "takeover" of YouTube's homepage for 24 hours for the same price.

Online "digital media" advertising - about $4 billion a year

Traditional TV advertising - $66.8 billion last year.

You're not contradicting my point, you're validating it.

Again, the shift from TV to online viewers is quantifiable. They do know how many people are watching online. So that is not a unknown variable in viewership, it is in fact the most accurately measured viewership.

However, that creates a problem because it also means that the known fact that Nielsen ratings are imprecise means that conservative advertisers will assume that the published numbers are higher than the number of actual viewers that were paying attention to the TV. As I said before, some people just leave the TV on as background noise. This is known behavior.

Because the Nielsen numbers are assumed to be higher than actual, attentive viewers, a base assumption is that ratings are an optimum number, not a real one. Thus, if they are showing low viewership, then the assumption is that actual viewership was even lower!

Now, since the network's own web site, along with Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and others impacts total viewership, those stats are valuable. And a lot of effort is being made to tally them, not least to determine how they impact TV viewership. But also, exactly as you say, online advertising is currently cheaper. The ability to demand a higher price has not yet entered that market, and it may never do so. Much the same way the phone companies abandoned charging variable fees for calls based on how far away you were calling, and ended up having to adopt flat plans, the internet is breaking the aged paradigm of advertising in ways they are still trying to figure out.

But, in the case of shows targeted at younger viewers, with less disposable income, who are increasingly moving away from the TV and towards their PC's and tablets, the willingness to fork over big money to advertise during shows with low ratings is dropping. Again, because the ratings are inflated anyway, and everybody knows that it is easier to ignore commercials on a computing device.

Which makes show revenue an issue. As I also said before, some networks plot to make up the difference over the long-term by way of expected rental/sale of fan favorite programs that people may want to view again years, or decades, down the road. Some shows that were losers during their actual runs have been big winners long after cancellation. A network may keep a show going if they believe that is the case. Or they may drop it just as fast if they think that a small group of fans loves it now, but nobody will remember it in 5-10 years.