Nuts! Jericho is Back!
Posted February 12th, 2008 by Clint
Ok, it’s just a bit off topic but Jericho is back tonight (10PM Pacific). In the household, we’ve been watching just about every rerun of the first season in anticipation of Jake’s (Skeet Ulrich) return to the small screen. My wife was one of those Rangers that via an online social media phenomenon sent over 50,000 Lbs (that’s right - 25 tons) to CBS when the show was canceled.
Now, I’m not that fanatic about the show (but I do really like it) however it’s interesting how a major user revolt caused CBS to make a substantive change in their programming strategy.
Go Rangers!
February 12th, 2008 at 19:01:51
Thanks Clint!! GO JERICHO RANGERS!
Hey folks, be sure to watch tonight - we need the ratings to ensure Season 3.
February 16th, 2008 at 07:34:38
[...] bookmarks tagged jericho on cbs Nuts! Jericho is Back! saved by 7 others zerosword47 bookmarked on 02/16/08 | [...]
March 10th, 2008 at 12:01:53
We put together a post a while back showing how the online audience for Jericho (your wife included) was hard to ignore: http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/07/tv-ratings-and-online-audiences/
Among non-reality TV shows, Jericho rated highest for average minutes per unique visitor. That’s an engaged audience.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:37:45
Hey Zach - I remember the post, but thanks for posting the link here, it is an interesting little analysis. I went back to re-read your post in order to see if anything occurred to me and I think that it’s this:
The challenge here, for any large media brand really - but for Jericho specifically, is that most of the engagement - the activity - is happening ‘off property’. The Jericholics/Rangers had their own sites away from CBS.com proper where they congregated and engaged and planned their battle. I think the same can be said of Joss Whedon fans - those “Brown Coats” (Firefly fans) had a loose federation (hehe) of sites away from Fox where they discussed Firefly and the movie Serenity.
Your analysis *might* be much more interesting (the differences more striking?) if you could use Media Builder to create custom segments or categories for each of those shows and where their audiences hang out online…
One further thought … I don’t know if Nielsen every got around to integrating their TV and Online panels (They’ve done it elsewhere) but that data would be very interesting. In other words, what percentage of the highly-engaged online fans DON’T show up in the TV Ratings data?
Again, thanks.
March 10th, 2008 at 17:51:13
I’m not so sure that the bulk of the online Jericho activity occurs off the cbs.com site. A few rough numbers to consider: according to comScore, the CBS Jericho site runs at around 100,000 to 200,000 unique visitors a month. The other Jericho fan sites (I googled a few, but could have missed some big ones) don’t show up in comScore. To get a sense of traffic for these sites, I ran an Alexa comparison against our site (www.juiceanalytics.com) which has about 30,000 unique visitors a month. These fan sites have significantly lower reach than Juice.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/oscar.com?site0=www.juiceanalytics.com&site1=http%3A%2F%2Fjerichooncbs.blogspot.com%2F&site2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jericholives.com%2F&site3=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.watchingjericho.com%2F&site4=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.radiofreejericho.com%2F&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=6m&size=Medium
Which isn’t to say the most rabid fans aren’t hanging out on non-CBS sites, or that there isn’t more intense activity if measured by spent or page views.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:35:43
Zach, my immediate reaction is that this is either sample or methodology bias. We all know that comScore is biased towards sites with large audiences (as all panel based measurement is) so it’s perfectly plausible that it’s hard to find the Jericho audience within comScore’s data. Since Alexa also suffers bias (it’s not anywhere near as rigorous as comScore) I’d argue that the chances are good that the fans aren’t there either (e.g. Jericho fans aren’t likely to install the Alexa toolbar and be counted).
So, it was probably my overoptimistic fault to suggest a media builder run in the first place.