Viewers were able to find the popular ABC program “Lost” last month—even though the show disappeared from TV screens in May 2008 and didn’t launch its fifth season until Jan. 21 of this year.
Some 1.4 million unique fans sought out past episodes from the cryptic cliffhanger on ABC.com, making it the most popular entertainment TV program streamed from broadcast network Web sites in the month, according to Nielsen Online.
NBC.com’s “Saturday Night Live” was the second most popular online program stream in December with 1.1 million unique viewers. ABC.com’s “Grey’s Anatomy” came in third with 879,000 unique viewers, and the network’s “Desperate Housewives” was fourth with 723,000 uniques for the month.
The report represents the first time Nielsen Online has tallied online audiences for specific online program titles. While it includes Web sites run by the broadcast channels themselves—ABC, CBS Television, CWTV, Fox Broadcasting and NBC—it does not include viewership on the popular video entertainment site Hulu.com, since that site doesn’t tag and track individual programs.
“We have begun publicly ranking specific programs streamed online because we achieved a critical mass of broadcast networks that are tagging their programs,” Nielsen Online vice president of media analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. “These rankings provide important insights into user activity.”
“Tagging” lets the monitoring agency determine not just that a video stream has been opened from a broadcast channel Web site but what the content of that stream is. That lets the networks—and potential online and offline advertisers—know how their programming is being consumed on the Web.
Getting an accurate read on the viewers who watch TV episodes over their Web sites may help broadcast networks counter the general decline in their offline audiences, particularly among the highly desirable teen and young adult demographics.
According to Gibs, the December 2008 results suggest that the audience for this programming is not just the same crowd who watch a program on TV.
“The broad diversity of top television network entertainment programs online suggests that there is more to online viewership than a simple extension of the TV audience,” he said.
While “Grey’s Anatomy” viewers may just be catching up on a show they usually watch on TV, “SNL” episodes online may be tapping into a new audience that wouldn’t normally watch the show in its Saturday night slot.
“Then there’s ‘Lost,’ which was not even on television in December,” Gibs said. “We believe viewers were using the Internet to familiarize themselves with the plot in advance of the showing returning in January.”
Marketers may want to pay attention not merely to audience size, but to which shows get the longest viewing minutes per user. Many viewers are just getting their first exposure to long-form video on the Web, so some of the video streams opened may not always be watched through to the end. Nielsen Online counts as a unique viewer anyone who watched all or part of an online episode or a program clip.
In December, viewers invested the most monthly minutes in “Privileged,” a program on the CWTV.com site, spending an average of 214.6 minutes watching the shows. Other programs whose online versions captivated viewers for the longest during the month were the NBC.com shows “Chuck” (162.5 minutes per viewer) and “Lipstick Jungle” (153.2 minutes per viewer), followed by the CWTV.com show “Gossip Girl” (140 minutes per viewer.)
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