Who is Watching and Who is "Tuning In"

Ratings vs. shares: measurements of the audience

Most of us are only familiar with TV ratings and we associate how many people tune into a show with the popularity of the show. But just because the program is on do we really know if audiences are actually tuning in? That’s where shares come in. There are two measurements that are used to see which households are tuned into a program and which households who are tuned in are actually watching it. That is the difference between audience ratings and audience shares.

Two shows, one network: possible cause and effects

An audience rating is the percentage of all possible homes with televisions that had the program on. We can take examples to compare and contrast a new season of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory that has been on air for many seasons now to CBS’s new hit, Elementary. We see that the ratings for The Big Bang Theory, which is a 4.8 is a lot higher than the ratings for Elementary, which is a 3.1, that’s why it is still on the air after multiple seasons. A share on the other hand is the percentage of all homes that were watching TV at the time, that had the program on and actually tuning in. The share for The Big Bang Theory was 15 while it was 9 for Elementary.

For being a new show, Elementary surprisingly brought in a good crowd. A good reasoning could be that CBS had the highest ratings and shares in general over the other TV networks during that specific night meaning most of their shows are more popular and more successful and so new shows are more likely to be watched or that the shows both aired on the same night so an audience might have just left the channel on CBS.  

What it takes to make the top ratings of 2011

TV ratings are easier to find than TV shares also because shares are sometimes estimated or rounded so a share for a show could potentially be 0.0. Sports games and reality/ competition shows bring in the highest TV ratings and we can see that in the 2011 rating rankings with Sunday night football, American idol, the X-factor and the Voice all being in the top 10 spots.