Here Comes the Pun

evangotlib:mattlehrer:dwineman:

Can someone explain this to me? Use small words because I don’t understand things.

Louie is a fantastic show, and I want to do everything I can to help it. But if I watch Louie on TV, which I can’t do because I don’t have cable but never mind, if I watch it the normal way, no one finds out, right? I’m not a Nielsen family. I’m not helping keep the show on the air.

But if I TiVo it, TiVo gets to report that fact — not to mention whether and when I watched it, and how many times — in their aggregate viewership statistics. If I Hulu it, Hulu and the network both get paid, royalties and ad revenue change hands, and I count as one more viewer on that medium. If I buy a season pass from iTunes, there’s no way that’s not getting counted somewhere because hell, I’m paying for it.

Can it really be true that none of that makes any difference? Do people who demonstrate the most affection for a show by buying it directly — or even just by recording every episode so they can’t possibly miss one — do those people’s opinions count the least, just because they aren’t tuning in live and filling out stupid mail-in surveys with dopey No. 2 pencils?

Or have I got it all wrong, and the television industry is actually not as fucked up as this tweet makes it seem?

It’s a little fucked up, but a lot of it has to do with ad revenue. Whatever ad revenue FX takes in from the show is much more than it’ll make on Hulu or iTunes.

For example, with a small audience, a :30 spot on FX during Louie might cost about $10,000-20,000. There’s the potential in one airing for $320,000 of ad revenue. The same revenue would require 160,000 downloads on iTunes, which is pretty unlikely, given its niche audience, and the fact that people can watch it for free on TV. Of course, that episode is going to re-air several times, and make a portion of that money many times over.

Why not TiVo? Well, because you can’t boast viewership based on TiVo’s proprietary data. Whatever statistics TiVo can gather are useless in the scheme of things. They’re as useless for broadcasters as all DVRs. The gold standard for viewership is still Nielsen data, and that’s not going away anytime soon. It’s what advertisers use to evaluate what programming they buy, and it’s what networks use to justify the prices they charge for advertising.

However, Louis C.K. is wrong about “don’t DVR,” because Nielsen measures viewership of DVR’ed programming, as long as it’s viewed within seven days. I guess “don’t DVR and let it sit there for seven days” wouldn’t have the same ring to it.

Why not Hulu? For the very reason you said: the revenue is split between Hulu and the network. It’s half the reason why networks are forcing Hulu to move away from a free model for the content. And while the cost per viewer of Hulu ads is higher, there’s not nearly as much ad inventory (not the eight minutes per half-hour you get on TV). Also, not nearly as many people are comfortable watching a program regularly on a computer as you think.

But back to the task at hand: is the industry as fucked up as you think? Sort of. If everyone watched the show on Hulu, it would definitely be cancelled, since it wouldn’t make enough money to stay afloat. Maybe that’s less a statement about how fucked up the industry is and more a statement about the industry’s inability to monetize their alternate delivery systems.