TV Networks Hide Bad Ratings With Typos, Report Says (cnet.com)

A report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers. From a report: It's described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show's average overall rating. The report says the practice was initially used sparingly -- for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event.

Comments

Fraud

[Sooner Boomer]

Many times, the network advertising rates are based upon rating shares. A deliberate deception, which raises the apparent share, and therefore ad rates, is fraud - plain and simple. The advertisers should be up in arms about this.

Re:Nielsen hasn't figured this trick out by now?

[EvilSS]

Let me explain how commercials generate revenue: Ad companies pay money to show ads during prime time. Bamph! Revenue. Commercial ad rates are based on the only rating that really counts: C3. This is the measure of live + 3 days of DVR viewing of the commercials (not the show). So media buyers have a pretty good idea of how many people are viewing the commercials. C3 ratings are rarely public but the live overnights are a pretty good substitute for how a show is doing, and the key factor sites like TVByTheNumbers and TheTVGrimReaper use to predict renewals/cancellations.

That said, they are pushing back and this year ad buy revenue has been flat for most networks compared to last year (usually goes up a bit each year). They are aware that the market is shrinking.

This is also why you are seeing more and more carriage disputes between cable/sat providers and the owners of the local affiliates (or the networks themselves if they are O&O stations). Carriage fees are a massive part of their revenue now, and they are using that as a bit of a buffer against falling viewership numbers. The affiliate owners keep pushing to increase the fees each contract.