AB has his blow by blow up on the barn: http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2010/01/oprahjay.html
[Note to self, do not get on AB's bad side, he can be a tiger] There is a lot of good stuff there, but what I paste below is my favorite. I have been going over my numbers and others I can find trying to make sense of Leno's claim yesterday that Conan's ratings were down 49% while his were only down 14%. I could not get this to compute no matter how I tried, and it obviously smelled like bull shit, but I assumed I must be missing something. AB shows I was - just how profound an asshole Leno really is. [NOTE: I actually think that Gaspin's report that Leno's show was down 30% is also bogus, since from what I can tell he is using a running average of Leno's 10:00 ratings that include highly inflated numbers for the first couple of weeks]. The basic point that AB is making here: don't get taken in by the Leno/NBC BS Fog machine that Conan's as a ratings disaster that only Leno could save the Tonight Show from; Conan's Tonight Show ratings in the demo declined 30% over Leno's previous year at the Tonight Show - which is the same percentage drop (30%) that Leno's 10:00 show had over the previous year's 10:00 line-up. ************************ WINFREY: Had Conan's numbers been higher, you'd have never been asked to go back to take the time slot? Mr. LENO: I never expected this to happen. People think you're behind the scenes pulling strings. There's no strings to pull. I have a show that's been canceled. So why would I have any power to go, oh, I want that? What happened was NBC came to me and they said, "Look, your show was down 14%, Conan's show was down 49%. We have a plan. We want to keep you both" because I asked, I said, "Can I be released from my contract?" And they said no. Actually, what Leno’s boss, NBCU entertainment chief Jeff Gaspin, told us on Jan. 10 at TV critics’ tour was that the 10 p.m. hour (9 Central) had declined *30 percent year-to-year.* The 14 percent figure, obviously, is Leno comparing his old 11:35 numbers to his 10 o’clock numbers, which is pointless, and comparing total audience figures instead of the demo, which is doubly pointless. He also compares his old 11:35 numbers to *Conan’s 11:35 numbers,* which would be acceptable except that, again, he is measuring the total audience figures for “The Tonight Show,” which went from 5 million under Leno to 2.5 million under O’Brien. *NBC has not used total audience figures in any meaningful way since the 1990s, when it began pushing aggressively for advertisers to rely on the 18-to-49 demographic.* So this is a bogus comparison in several ways. The correct way to measure is 18-49, comparable time period, year to year. And as I wrote <http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/story/1691791.html>last week: Conan’s “Tonight Show” rating among adults ages 18-49, a key group for advertisers, has declined by the same amount, 30 percent, as NBC’s rating at 9 p.m. (10 Eastern), when “The Jay Leno Show” airs. In other words, Conan was being hurt by his low-rated, non-traditional lead-in ... the star of which was then asked to take Conan’s place at 11:35. And people wonder why he's pissed. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
