Slashdot Mirror
The Nielsen Family Is Dead
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Wired walks us through how the so-called Nielsen Family, responsible for deciding which shows were good and which were flops since the '70s, isn't the be-all, end-all of TV popularity anymore. Quoting: 'Over the years, the Nielsen rating has been tweaked, but it still serves one fundamental purpose: to gauge how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set. But that's not how we watch any more. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating. (In February Nielsen announced that this fall it would finally begin including Internet streaming to TV sets in its ratings.) And the TV experience doesn't stop when the episode ends. We watch with tablets on our laps so we can look up an actor's IMDb page. We tweet about the latest plot twist (discreetly, to avoid spoilers). We fill up the comments section of our favorite online recappers. We kibitz with Facebook friends about Hannah Horvath's latest paramour. We start Tumblrs devoted to Downton decor. We're engaging with a show even if we aren't watching it, but none of this behavior factors into Nielsen's calculation of its impact.'"
I look at the pirate sites to see what's popular on TV. That's a truer reflection of what the general public wants to watch, because the seed and leech count isn't some complex proprietary formula. While fakes do pop up, with companies trying to poison the peer population to discourage downloading, the protocol is self-correcting and it is really just further evidence of its popularity. It represents an intentional and willful effort to watch these shows, not just a casual interest because it feels less lonely than leaving the TV on to blare commercials while you do something else. If you want to know which shows are popular, not just locally, but internationally then torrent sites are really the best measure of a show's actual popularity. And it's not limited to TV either; A movie's true popularity is also reflected in the download count, moreso than an imdb rating.
You can't trust for-profit organizations to give fair an unbiased numbers -- for enough money, they're only too happy to rig the system. There's companies whose sole reason for existance is to push books onto the New York Times' best seller lists. Because sales data and other information is all kept hidden behind a wall of corporate proprietary data, it's possible to rig the system.
The pirates... you can't rig the system. Either it's popular, or it isn't. No games, no bullshit.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Off an on for years, single parents I guess is a demographic they care about but they make it VERY clear that it is NOT just OTA TV anymore. if you are playing games, watching YouTube, whatever? They want you to fill that in. I even told them last time they asked me "You DO know I don't even watch OTA TV anymore? that everything I enjoy is online?" and they said "That's fine, just write down at the bottom of the page what you were doing instead of OTA TV" and I guess it made them happy as I was asked to do it again about 6 months ago.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
These days Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, etc. know not only if you watched a show, but how many times you watched it, where you paused, which parts you re-watched, etc. (FYI, hook up Wireshark or Firefox's web console and see for yourself what information is being logged!)
The quantity and quality of the data is better than ever. As more people switch from broadcast and cable to online streaming, why would you need a random sample like the "Nielsen family"? It seems so blunt compared to the accurate real-time data that streaming services can provide.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I look at the pirate sites to see what's popular on TV. That's a truer reflection of what the general public wants to watch, because the seed and leech count isn't some complex proprietary formula.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded. Contrary to the prevailing slashdot wisdom, this site is not 'the general public'. Sure, the actual general public is closer to the slashdot demo than, say, 15 years ago, but they are not identical.
The problem with pirate sites is monetization. Let's suppose that the number of downloads of Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay is the most accurate assessment of its popularity. Further, let's posit that 90% of the views come from that. Why does it matter to HBO? How do they recoup the development costs from a TPB viewer? And it matters not whether it is HBO, A&E, or NBC. Someone has to pay actors, writers, directors, etc. Until there is a better method of determining paying customers/viewers, there is still some relevance to traditional ratings. How much and to what degree, we can argue (well, you can. I'm not interested in those minutiae).
So yes, the viewership through pirate sites is interesting for help in determining popularity, but not necessarily in determining what gets made. The reign of 'non-scripted' shows as an example, is as much due to decreased costs of production (especially avoiding the WGA and DGA) at least as much, if not more than how popular they are.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Yep, maybe I'm just old, but I've never used any of "Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet" to watch tv. I don't know who Hannah Horvath is (and no I'm not going to google it, and not interested in anyone responding to this post to enlighten me about who she is), I've never watched an episode of Downton Abbey, ever visited Tumblr, and I don't have a twitter account. Also, I have no idea what a "kibitz with Facebook friends" is.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
You can rig it. There's little to stop you from downloading something many times.
BitTorrent Trackers don't count downloads - they count the number of active seeders and leechers.
While you are connected to the tracker and downloading a file, your session will add 1 to the leech count. When the download completes, the leech count is decremented 1. If you delete/move this file and initiate another download, this will simply temporarily add 1 to the leech count again.
Sure it is game-able. You could have multiple clients on different ports simultaneously downloading and hope that the tracker doesn't amalgamate all connections from the same IP to count as one. This, however, would be very taxing on your connection not to mention extremely resource intensive, especially with the wide adoption of crypto in BitTorrent.
Even if this was actively rigged, would it be any worse off than the Nielsen system? Can we honestly believe that it is not completely rigged? The participants are known ahead of time. Is it not possible that they be chosen according a particular agenda or otherwise enticed.
[Rent This Space]
Nielsen has one and only purpose - to help price ad-time buys. Shows on bittorrent have had the ads stripped out. The people watching those versions might as well not exist for all that Nielsen's customers care.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
For something to be made, there needs to be a measurable minimum viable audience. If the audience can't be measured, it doesn't count. If you're using advertising to fund the production, you've got to hit a certain number of eyeballs in a certain short period. SyFy seemed to have hit this problem with Eureka and Stargate Universe. People were watching - but not enough to cover the costs of making it. So while we might be getting a great variety and diversity of content - that very diversity is fragmenting the audience so much that a lot of stuff becomes financially unviable. The Neilsen Family provided stifling homogeneity, but it also did sustain a standard of TV production that will be difficult to replicate in a future of fragmented micro-audiences.
At first I thought this was another American gun massacre story.
I'm not watching TV since 2005. Such a waste of time.
Unlike slashdot
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded.
Then explain to me the popularity of Jersey Shore on the Pirate Bay.
Contrary to the prevailing slashdot wisdom, this site is not 'the general public'.
I'm sorry, you make me choke on my mountain dew. Slashdot? Wisdom? I think you have this site confused for another. And besides, we weren't talking about slashdot, we were talking about The Pirate Bay, which is the 73rd most visited site on the internet according to Alexia. But please, continue...
The problem with pirate sites is monetization.
Okay, just so we're clear: You're saying a website whose primary purpose is to allow the free distribution of copyrighted materials has a problem with monetization?
Let's suppose that the number of downloads of Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay is the most accurate assessment of its popularity. Further, let's posit that 90% of the views come from that. Why does it matter to HBO?
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about accurately assessing the popularity of a show, which is what Nielsen ratings are supposed to do. I wasn't aware that this had anything to do with the price of tea in China... or the price of an HBO subscription for that matter.
Someone has to pay actors, writers, directors, etc.
Again, and that has what to do with the price of tea in China? We're looking at methods of assessing the popularity of a show, and the pros and cons of each method. Who writes the paycheck out to those people has exactly dick to do with that.
Until there is a better method of determining paying customers/viewers, there is still some relevance to traditional ratings.
Ah. So you're moving the goal posts. Well, allow me to move them back. Let's say you're in the market for a new car. New car by definition means you're going to be buying from a dealer, or from the manufacturer. So the market for used cars is therefore totally irrelevant, right? Wrong. Even though you're going to a different seller, the laws of supply and demand apply equally to both, and the reasons people buy a used car are similar to the reasons they buy a new car. So if a car has a strong value on the used car market, it's going to have an impact on the price, and popularity, of the new car market as well. Whether the customers are paying or not may matter to the producers of the show, but it has little or no impact on whether or not the viewing public wants to watch the show. And I'm willing to bet that if 10% of Game of Thrones is pirated, then about 10% of NCIS is going to be pirated too, even though they're different shows. And if NCIS is more popular than Game of Thrones amongst the non-paying customers, it's probably going to be more popular amongst the paying customers as well because they're the same demographic.
So yes, the viewership through pirate sites is interesting for help in determining popularity, but not necessarily in determining what gets made.
Whoa there cowboy. Again: China. Tea. Price of. We aren't discussing the criterion for how TV shows get selected for production, we're discussing the pros and cons of a ratings system for shows that are already in production.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yes, pretty much every 'legit' method of viewing a show on the internet has the ability to be way more accurate than the current method of nielsen ratings because they can count every single viewing by their entire customer base rather than sampling and/or relying on the honesty (and mental accuity) of nielsen families.
But piracy? They don't care. Frankly, I see that as a benefit of being a pirate, less surveilllence. On the other hand, it isn't scalable given the current model of commercial-funding. If it switches from ad-time buys to product-placement, then piracy stats will become meaningful (and shows will become very bland, no big money client is going to want to be associated with a show that might piss even a sliver of their customer base). If we go to something better, a la the ransom model, then it won't really matter all that much.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's dumb. The main value of Nielsen is not that it measures popularity. It measures viewership of the shows (and thus ads) that air on TV.
Ad rates are tied to Nielsen ratings. And this has not changed. So the Nielsen family is as relevant as ever.
Sure, Hulu stats matter too, to fix the price of ads that air on Hulu.
It's amazing how many people think that somehow because they don't watch TV that it is not longer relevant what TV ratings are.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So basically any TV show that doesn't target the 20-40yo white nerd male demographic isn't popular?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Don't pretend you've never used youtube. If that's the case, why do you even need a color monitor or a graphics card?
Never said I didn't use youtube, but since you ask, I've certainly never watched an entire episode of a tv show using youtube.
The main reason I need a graphics card and a colour monitor at work is that the 3d mechanical and optical simulation software I use to design stuff requires an openGL capable graphics card to display some types of results.
I generally don't use my computer to watch video - I have a nice big flat screen tv at home to do that.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded.
Then explain to me the popularity of Jersey Shore on the Pirate Bay.
Most popular Jersey Shore episode on TPB: s06e13 with 104 seeds and 4 leeches.
Most popular Big Bang Theory: s06e19 with 19202 seeds and 538 leeches.
There... "popularity" of Jersey Shore on TPB explained.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There... "popularity" of Jersey Shore on TPB explained.
Last airing of Jersey Shore: December 7, 2012
Last airing of Big Bang: Today.
I think I see a flaw in your cunning assessment. If you look for a single episode of Big Bang uploaded on or before the same date, you get about the same count: 128 seeds, 2 leeches, respectively. When Jersey Shore isn't on its off-season, those numbers will be a lot higher. But I can't fault you for not knowing that torrents of TV shows tend to be most popular when first released, and then quickly drop in both seed and leech count... I mean, it's not something the average person would know.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think this article, and probably many of the comments, shows how little people understand of how the ratings and broadcast networks' business model works.
The "family" has been dead for years, ratings-wise. The only numbers that count -- at all -- are adults 18-49, and within that group women 18-34 are particularly valued. That's why singing and dancing competitions rule the airwaves. If you are under 18 or older than 49 your TV viewing habits do not matter to advertisers, they do not matter to networks. An 100 million kids could watch a prime time TV show, and it will still get canceled if not enough adults are watching.
Why? Because TV networks do not have viewers as customers, it's the advertisers that pay their bills. And the advertisers have decided that those are the only age ranges worth selling to, on prime-time TV.
Online, DVD sales, international sales do NOT bring any revenue whatsoever to TV networks, and no matter how popular a show is off of a US TV set, it is worthless if it does not have an high rating in the key demo. Unless -- and only, unless -- the Network is also the production company for that show. (but most are not) Production companies do make money from DVDs online purchases, rights and online ads -- so a company (such as amazon or Hulu) can bypass the Networks and produce successfully online, as is now happening.
I do disagree with the advertisers age ranges, and feel they could monetize the younger and older audiences as well. But I do also understand why they feel they can reach these audiences easily without any need to pay for expensive TV ads.
We are probably reaching a transition point in TV viewing anyway. A business model like the MLB.TV model is one that probably works best. A worldwide 24/7 online TV channel paid for by subscription and/or advertising. It provides full demographic info in real time, allows one-click purchasing to firms, and it allows for long-tail and niche programming too. That is a much better model for advertisers and viewers -- but not too good for the network middlemen, unless they jump on that bandwagon right now.
As an aside, similar is true for movies -- which have a totally different demographic (12-24 usually). Long, long gone are movies like "The Sand Pebbles". Why? Because adults do not go to the cinema in sufficient numbers to matter, unless they are taking their kids to see a kids movie. There is very little overlap between TV and movies in terms of significant audience. Movies are only for children, and TV is only for adults these days (and female adults mostly too, since men are easy targets through sports).
Good point. I guess one could connect to the tracker and announce that they are seeding/leeching and simply drop all incoming connections. This is highly probable, though the multitude of leechers coming from the same IP / IP range is sure to tip of the tracker maintainers and BitTorrent community quite promptly. The community will likely respond with a patch to count only 1 connection per IP and to disregard counts for inactive downloads/uploads.
Actually, just such a patch has been built into all mainstream bittorrent clients for years. Clients will only accept 1 connection at a time from a given IP address. And if the data provided is incorrect, after a certain number of bad chunks (defined in the client options, but typically around 3-5), it will be banned.
That said, some trolls did try to interfere with the downloading DVD screener copies this past year right around the time the Emmy's were being voted on by registering thousands of fake peers with the trackers, in a sort of DDoS. The reasoning is believed to be that if they could lower the effective download rate or otherwise make it take a long time to download the torrent, people would give up. Unfortunately for them, their cunning plan failed to consider that computers do not "give up"; After a few hours, all of their fake peers had been attempted (and banned by each other participating client), so while the length of time did increase for the torrent, it was not by an appreciable amount -- it doesn't take long to send 68 byte packets to a few thousand, or even ten thousand, unique IP addresses, and you don't need to get more than a handful of non-fakes to get your download up to full speed.
The other, more successful, method was to seed fake torrents with similar names and filesizes to the legitimate ones, thus forcing people to waste large amounts of bandwidth to get rick-rolled (proverbially speaking). The files would be corrupt, have severely distorted video and/or audio, or simply be a "Shame on you" advert repeated over and over. Very shortly after this, all the major torrent sites introduced the notion of "verified" torrents, and allowed anyone to rank a torrent, or otherwise flag it as crap. The practice has since stopped for the same reason spam e-mail usually doesn't make it through: A web of trust is a simple, yet powerful way, to sort the chaffe from the wheat.
So while there are ways to attack the bittorrent protocol, they are expensive and only result in a small loss of time and effort. For this reason, these attacks aren't common anymore, though less-technically minded groups (I'm looking at you, form-letter enforcement companies) perenially make the attempt thinking nobody's ever done it before. :)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
the moment VHS and Beta came on the market and allowed us to tape our shows, that's when Neilsen became obsolete. That and the fact that there are certain types of shows which timeslot and popularity have no relationship. We are empowered to watch a TV on our own time by being able to record it. Neilsen ratings have been a failure for a long time, but then again, the entire sponsoring mechanism behind funding a show isn't all that good either.. Look at shows like Stargate SG-1 who didn't rely on sponsors.. lasted 10 seasons and spun off 2 other shows and direct to movie DVDs, etc..
And what would you bet that a Nielsen family 'just happens' to develop more sophisticated tastes now that someone is watching...
Neilsen attempted to use me as a "Nielsen family" once. I watch TV maybe once a week, don't have cable, am more likely to view a DVD than a broadcast program, and get most of my radio off the Internet.
You REALLY don't want my opinions shaping what shows get killed.
They should care about them because they are potential customers. Sure, some will never pay, but some would if the same media was available for a reasonable price. No ads, no DRM, just a high quality MKV for say 50 cents (Euro/US).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Pirate sites show you what's popular on TV with the average user who is knowledgeable enough to know how to pirate TV shows; or their girlfriends/wives. It doesn't tell you what the general public wants to watch. None of my son's grandparents/aunts/uncles would fall into that category. My plumber wouldn't; my finish carpenter wouldn't, my drywaller doesn't even have e-mail, my friend the lawyer is also right-out, my doctor is not represented... Many people are not represented in your statistics... On the upside, Firefly would probably not have been cancelled.
Yes, you keep spending all your time at work. And don't socialize with your friends or co-workers who might talk about The Walking Dead or Dexter at lunch... You just sit at your desk and munch on your salad while you work really hard; then you go home and code up a storm before bedtime..
The rest of us will maybe go out with friends, maybe play some Ultimate or go for a bike ride and then perhaps watch a bit of TV before bedtime...
I look at the pirate sites to see what's popular on TV. That's a truer reflection of what the general public wants to watch, because the seed and leech count isn't some complex proprietary formula. While fakes do pop up, with companies trying to poison the peer population to discourage downloading, the protocol is self-correcting and it is really just further evidence of its popularity. It represents an intentional and willful effort to watch these shows, not just a casual interest because it feels less lonely than leaving the TV on to blare commercials while you do something else. If you want to know which shows are popular, not just locally, but internationally then torrent sites are really the best measure of a show's actual popularity. And it's not limited to TV either; A movie's true popularity is also reflected in the download count, moreso than an imdb rating.
You can't trust for-profit organizations to give fair an unbiased numbers -- for enough money, they're only too happy to rig the system. There's companies whose sole reason for existance is to push books onto the New York Times' best seller lists. Because sales data and other information is all kept hidden behind a wall of corporate proprietary data, it's possible to rig the system.
The pirates... you can't rig the system. Either it's popular, or it isn't. No games, no bullshit.
You're making the assumption that torrents are downloaded by a representative sample of the global audience. It's not, it's skewed towards "geeks"
However neilson doesn't care about how many people watch a given tv show, they care about how many watch the adverts.
Like it or not, American idol and the like attract a large number of viewers. These people watch it live as braindead tv, and therefore watch adverts.
People time shifting, which I'd guess is how most people watch quality tv, will skip the adverts. People downloading never even see the adverts.
This is a problem for networks that rely on advertising
One quiet Sunday morning in 2007 at around 8:00 am, I received a call. It was from a survey company asking if I would talk to them about taking a survey. I politely explained I was on the "Do Not Call" list and requested that they don't call again. The woman on the other end of the phone was aghast at my response. She responded, "...but were the Nielson Ratings company", to which I promptly responded, "So." Again she was floored at the fact that I would not take the survey and didn't care it was the Nielson Ratings. She stammered, "But were the prestigious Nielsons Ratings Company." and she said something else still trying to convince me to take their survey. I finally responded, (paraphrased) "I don't care who your are at 8:00 am on a Sunday morning, you woke me up for some survey that I don't want to take, good bye." I then promptly hung up.
I don't care who you are, if I politely inform you that I don't want to take your call, simply be gracious enough to not argue with me and end the call.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
If it switches from ad-time buys to product-placement
Product placement can't always fill the needs of an advertiser. It works well for food, clothing, and cars among others. It's much less simple for things like insurance, otc drugs, or other TV shows. It makes syndication less attractive. And it's *terrible* for localization. There are plenty of smaller businesses that can afford local media buys but have neither the budget nor the desire for a national one. But with product placement, that's difficult at best.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
nonsense, we spend a half hour doing slashdot AT work, the catch up on the hulu.....see how efficient that is? plenty of time for friends when we're not being paid...
I dont care for ether of them, but my wife and daughter love them both. Nether of them is "Technical" but both of them are capable of and do download the torrents for those shows as well as a show that I think is called "Once upon a time" but I could be wrong on the name.
I however am technical, and I throttle there torrent connections so I can get AMC's Walking Dead faster. :P
Just before the turn of the century, our household was offered the opportunity to be part of the Nielson ratings.
Owing to remembering all-too-often experience as a youth, when I would start to watch new shows that I really liked, only to see them cancelled before they finished even half a season, let alone established any kind of closure for the events in the show, simply on account of poor ratings, I believed that the chance to be actively involved in measuring the my involvement in the shows that I liked would finally be my opportunity for my voice to be heard. Certainly, since every member in a Nielson home represents a viewership of something on the order of 10,000 or more viewers in other households, I figured that if records were actually being kept about which shows that I watch, and this information was handed to the neworks, then the chance of a show that I liked being cancelled was bound to be that much less.
They hooked up devices to all of our video equipment, to record not only which stations we were watching, but also which programs we were recording. The logging-in procedure was perhaps the most tedious aspect, having to be repeated every couple of hours if the TV was still on to ensure that people were still actually there, but I still found it reassuring that my votes were counting for something. Each member of our household was assigned a unique button on the set-top box which represented that individual's viewership, so that they could track demographics for a show and not just whether or not a program was simply being watched. When our niece came to live with us in 2000, they assigned her a button as well.
Then, in 2003. the first new show I was really interested in since we started being a Nielson household came on the air on what was then called the "UPN network", Jake 2.0. All 6 of us in my family enjoyed the show, and watched it religiously every week. Alas, however, it was cancelled after 16 episodes.
I was quite upset about this. Finally the few TV shows that I actually watched were actually being noted by people who had influence to affect the program, and when a new show comes on that I really like and watch every single week, the show gets cancelled anyway.
I called up our regional contact person later that same week and told her that I wanted the stuff pulled out of our equipment... that we were resigning. She was disappointed to hear it, and attempted to tell me that contrary to my beliefs, my voice was really being heard, but as it apparently didn't make any difference to the outcome, I ended it then and there.
I remember saying to the tech person as they were dismantling the equipment from out TV and VCR, however, that I thought they should probably start expanding their facilities to include Internet usage. He nodded in agreement with me while he worked, saying that it would be a good idea, but that he felt the technology wasn't quite ready to make that practical.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The basis of the Nielsen system was that a representative group would convey the viewing habits of all customers.
What they're saying is that the Pirate Bay downloads are a good measure of what's popular - among both downloaders and paying customers.
Also, don't forget that there is overlap between the two groups. I download virtually every episode of Game of Thrones from TPB. I also maintain an HBO subscription. The reasoning is simple - I like to watch the show when it broadcasts but I also will rewatch the show a few times later as well. Beyond the first watching I want to watch at my own convenience without putting up with the aggravation that is HBO Go, so I go download the show there as well.
Similarly, I also have AMC and watch the first broadcast of The Walking Dead live, but then always download it so I can watch it a few more times.
To a large degree TPB operates in place of me having a DVR.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Explain Beethoven. Explain red velvet cupcakes. Explain Batman.
If these things were explainable, then the content producers would just crank the formula and produce popular content. We wouldn't need to have a popularity measuring stick like the Nielsen ratings. However, when they try to crank the formula we get shows like "Swamp Pickers" and "Ice Road Idol".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Oh, but in the grand 'logic' of 'girlintraining', quality content will magically appear on TPB merely because it is popular.
My logic was purely regarding the topic of discussion, which was assessing the actual popularity of a show. I have at no point, anywhere, in any post, entertained the idea of where quality content comes from. If magical space unicorns shit rainbow content out and that's how it appears, well, great. It's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is ranking of content that is already available in an accurate and unbiased fashion.
Your logic, on the other hand... TROLL.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They may not have sold many $50 Castle posters, but there have been 4 NYT Bestseller novels that have spun off from the series, a couple of graphic novels, etc... So they have certainly expanded the market beyond purely the TV show and the advertising scheduled around it.
BTW the Richard Castle novels have been a pretty good read for a ghost written novel that loosely echoes a TV series. I quite enjoy seeing the parody characters interact like shadow puppets of their 'Real Life' counterparts.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World