On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 5:46 PM PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > I Agree with you about all of these ratings discussions except this year > during the pandemic. > > For some years now I have been posting here after every major sports or > awards event that has falling ratings that gets attributed to politics or > whatnot that that is mostly noise, and the signal has been a steady fall in > the number of Americans watching TV. My argument has been that for these > discussions what is really relevant is the percent decline in ratings, > compared both to other major events that year, and to that event’s rate of > decline over last decade. > > Almost certainly the GG ratings would have been worse this year than last > year regardless, but also almost certainly not as bad as they were in this > pandemic year. My prediction is that The next GG show that takes place > after a mostly opened up society will have ratings higher that this year > but lower than last year, roughly on the line of historical declines in > ratings prior to the pandemic. >
INtuitively that makes sense. But we have two data points, last year and this year's ratings, and there's no way to prove what this year's ratings would be without the pandemic. If the pandemic started a year ago went away after two or three months then things would have snapped back to "normal" and we would expect the ratings to follow historical trends. But this disruption has gone on long enough to break habits and automatically made choices. And once the habit is broken it doesn't just reappear when the circumstances change. There are a lot of factors that would point to the opportunity for the Golden Globes to be a smash hit this year: It's a live event, it's airing for free, and the largest number of Americans ever are sitting at home looking for something to do. The fact that so few chose to watch tells me that the actual number of viewers is as much as they were going to get. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiGUrnyP4XuPYaF%2B%2BHSzPvmaEcoSGdZjmjfD8ySR%3D%3DBZiQ%40mail.gmail.com.
