MLP Ratings Options

[Mako Crab]

So do we know how MLP is doing in terms of ratings? I'm curious to know how it rates compared to The Hub's other programs and how it fares against the competition for its particular timeslot. I tried Nielson Ratings, but they were down. Anyone know?

[RC85747]

Hasbro is trumpeting the Royal Wedding ratings:

Hub TV Network Scores Record High Audience With Outstanding Performance of Special Royal Wedding of the Year on 'My Little Pony Friendship is Magic'
Strong Performance of Series Drives Network To Second Best-Ever Saturday in Network's History

LOS ANGELES – A record-setting performance by the much-buzzed-about, two-episode special wedding of Princess Cadance and Shining Armor -- from the pop-culture phenomenon series “My Little Pony Friendship is Magic”-- on Saturday, April 21, delivered the best-ever audience numbers for any series in the history of The Hub among the target demographics of Kids 2-11, Kids 6-11 and Households. The series is produced by Hasbro Studios.

The first episode of the two-part “My Little Pony Friendship is Magic” Royal Wedding Event (Saturday, 1-1:30 p.m. ET) was The Hub’s best-ever telecast in network history with Kids 6-11, Kids 2-11 and Households. It was the second-best ever among Persons 2+.

The first episode earned year-to-year delivery gains among Kids 6-11 (+1047%, 218,000), Kids 2-11 (+1100%, 336,000), Women 18-49 (+140%, 36,000), Adults 18-49 (+102%, 95,000), Persons 2+ (+369%, 483,000) and Households (+286%, 363,000).

The second episode (1:30-2 p.m. ET) was second-best telecast in The Hub’s history with Kids 6-11 and Households, ranking third best-ever with Kids 2-11.

The second episode earned year-to-year delivery gains among Kids 6-11 (+654%, 211,000), Kids 2-11 (+487%, 311,000), Women 18-49 (+80%, 36,000), Adults 18-49 (+46%, 104,000), Persons 2+ (+157%, 475,000) and Households (+130%, 341,000).

Driven by the outstanding performance of Saturday’s “My Little Pony Friendship is Magic” Royal Wedding Event, The Hub earned its second-best Saturday (6 a.m. – 12 a.m.) in network history with Kids 6-11 (58,000), Kids 2-11 (98,000), Persons 2+ (184,000) and Households (129,000).

http://investor.hasbro.com/releasedetail.c...eleaseID=666931

Good news all around.

[Zeel1]

How expected~

[Creature SH]

This is a very weird listing.

They have Women 18-49 (+140%, 36,000) and Adults 18-49 (+102%, 95,000). Why have women as a separate value? Especially when these numbers indicate that the adult male audience is twice as large.

Okay, I'm not that naive. I know that good old sexism is alive and all and they want to play down the male audience. Still, it's a very odd way to list those numbers.

[Dvandom]

That, or 18-49 year old male ratings didn't move upward enough to bother reporting.

---Dave

[wonko the sane?]

It also helps them break down the demographics further, so they know how, when and where to advertise. For instance: they now know that putting commercials for the next season JUST on the hub website, and channel will be wasting potential. If they up it so that facebook is running banners, as well as female orientate websites and TV stations, they'll continue to draw at least the same audience as before, as well as reaching more people in the same demographic who aren't currently running the show.

I wonder how the numbers would look if it was possible to factor in the pirating...

[Scavgraphics]

Also, those numbers aren't for us (as in normal...or "normal"...people), they're for advertisers..

"Hey there, Barbie Inc., rather than spending your money over at Nickelodeon to get young women, look at what we can offer you!"

As we know, the female oriented cartoon world is limited, so this is a focus on what Hub is offering to the ad world. They're pretty secure on the male side, with Transformers and GI Joe.

[Fero McPigletron]

Awesome news!

What was the first best shows though? If MLP is second and third best.

[Sobana]

Okay, I'm not that naive. I know that good old sexism is alive and all and they want to play down the male audience. Still, it's a very odd way to list those numbers.

Like everypony else said, a TV show generally makes most of it's money through commercial advertising. The more people who watch it, the more they charge for ad time. With that much money going around, companies want to know that their commercials will be seen by people most likely to buy their product. If the demographic is mostly male, you wouldn't want to air your female hygiene commercial during that show. If is is mostly women who watch the show, it would be best not to show your beer commercial with the scantily clad women. If it's a kid's show, it would be highly unlikely they would show a truck or lawn care commercial.

The better the ratings, the more money the show gets. The more money they get, the bigger their budget gets. The bigger the budget, the better quality show we receive. The better the show, the higher the ratings get.

[MyLittleEmpath]

Okay, I'm not that naive. I know that good old sexism is alive and all and they want to play down the male audience. Still, it's a very odd way to list those numbers.

Like everypony else said, a TV show generally makes most of it's money through commercial advertising. The more people who watch it, the more they charge for ad time. With that much money going around, companies want to know that their commercials will be seen by people most likely to buy their product. If the demographic is mostly male, you wouldn't want to air your female hygiene commercial during that show. If is is mostly women who watch the show, it would be best not to show your beer commercial with the scantily clad women. If it's a kid's show, it would be highly unlikely they would show a truck or lawn care commercial.

The better the ratings, the more money the show gets. The more money they get, the bigger their budget gets. The bigger the budget, the better quality show we receive. The better the show, the higher the ratings get.

And yet, there are still car commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons.

[Fortress Ironhol...]

Okay, I'm not that naive. I know that good old sexism is alive and all and they want to play down the male audience. Still, it's a very odd way to list those numbers.

Like everypony else said, a TV show generally makes most of it's money through commercial advertising. The more people who watch it, the more they charge for ad time. With that much money going around, companies want to know that their commercials will be seen by people most likely to buy their product. If the demographic is mostly male, you wouldn't want to air your female hygiene commercial during that show. If is is mostly women who watch the show, it would be best not to show your beer commercial with the scantily clad women. If it's a kid's show, it would be highly unlikely they would show a truck or lawn care commercial.

The better the ratings, the more money the show gets. The more money they get, the bigger their budget gets. The bigger the budget, the better quality show we receive. The better the show, the higher the ratings get.

And yet, there are still car commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons.

That's because it's still assumed that there are parents which actually watch TV with their kids.


(Sorry, but to me, the "power" button should have been sufficient to render the V-chip unnecessary.)

[Sobana]

Okay, I'm not that naive. I know that good old sexism is alive and all and they want to play down the male audience. Still, it's a very odd way to list those numbers.

Like everypony else said, a TV show generally makes most of it's money through commercial advertising. The more people who watch it, the more they charge for ad time. With that much money going around, companies want to know that their commercials will be seen by people most likely to buy their product. If the demographic is mostly male, you wouldn't want to air your female hygiene commercial during that show. If is is mostly women who watch the show, it would be best not to show your beer commercial with the scantily clad women. If it's a kid's show, it would be highly unlikely they would show a truck or lawn care commercial.

The better the ratings, the more money the show gets. The more money they get, the bigger their budget gets. The bigger the budget, the better quality show we receive. The better the show, the higher the ratings get.

And yet, there are still car commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons.

That's because it's still assumed that there are parents which actually watch TV with their kids.


(Sorry, but to me, the "power" button should have been sufficient to render the V-chip unnecessary.)

V-chip?

[TM2-Megatron]

I watched the Hub once via a livestream; the commercials were atrocious. Is that typical of commercials in the US, or was the Hub just scraping the bottom of the barrel?

[Matenshi]

I watched the Hub once via a livestream; the commercials were atrocious. Is that typical of commercials in the US, or was the Hub just scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Most commercials are indeed awful.

I recall there being some better ones in the 80's and/or early 90's (and I don't think that's just nostalgia), but yeah, I can't stand most commercials nowadays. They tend to be either extremely bland/cliché or extremely stupid/annoying.

[Fortress Ironhol...]

I watched the Hub once via a livestream; the commercials were atrocious. Is that typical of commercials in the US, or was the Hub just scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Do you remember which commercials you saw?

I ask as it's pretty hit-and-miss.

On one hand, you can get some fairly intelligent ones floating around. For example, during the Super Bowl there was a Chrysler commercial which had Clint Eastwood doing his own rendition of Reagan's "Morning In America" speech and trying to convince people that better days are around the corner (some communities are still suffering due to the after-effects of the recession). It might sound trite, but even doing it in the first place required such an absolutely huge degree of bravado on Chrysler's part that we're presently discussing it in the marketing class I'm taking this semester.

On the other hand, you can get some truly awful ones that make you wonder how the ad execs are still in business. For example, most of the advertisements for Progressive Auto Insurance focus on a dangerously hyperactive insurance broker named Flo who's so erratic at times that she makes Pinkie Pie & Derpy look sedate by comparison. There's actually an ad in which we're supposed to sympathize with her when she sabotages a robot because she's jealous of it.

Most ads, however, are in the middle. They pitch the product and that's it. They're good, decent ads. For example, the Pillow Pets advertisements do a reasonable job of showing the main feature of the product: they're pillows that can be turned inside-out in order to produce stuffed animals. The product is shown, kids are shown having fun with it, and parents are "encouraged" to get it for their kids.

[Fortress Ironhol...]

V-chip?

Back in the 1990s, shows like "Beavis & Butt-Head" and "South Park" started airing.

Although the shows were meant for teens and twenty-somethings, parents nation-wide saw that they were animated and automatically presumed they were child-friendly.

Cue a major backlash from "concerned parents" who wanted the shows banned or at least heavily censored.

In response, the government and the broadcasters adopted the TV ratings system that we have today wherein individual episodes of individual shows now have their own ratings (Y, Y7, G, PG, TV-14, TV-M).

This led to a number of TV manufacturers to design hardware that would seek out the ratings provided by cable & satellite providers; if a program exceeded the maximum rating assigned by the owner of the set, it wouldn't show the item in question. Hence, the dawn of the V-Chip.


About 10 years ago, a number of DVD manufacturers tried something similar. DVD players were now being designed that had parental controls of their own, meaning that they wouldn't play any movie whose rating was higher than a set level. In response, they began encoding disks with a program that would pro-actively seek out the control settings on a player.

Unfortunately, the encoding was seriously flawed in that it wouldn't take "no" for an answer. If your DVD player could take parental controls, but you didn't have them set, the disk would keep searching for those settings. If you didn't pull your disk out in time, it'd actually damage the player. Making matters worse, the disks weren't labelled as having this feature; the only way to know if you had such a disk was to pop it in your player and wait for the protests.

I actually had a DVD player fall victim to this, and I was ultimately forced to go buy a new one.

[Sobana]

About 10 years ago, a number of DVD manufacturers tried something similar. DVD players were now being designed that had parental controls of their own, meaning that they wouldn't play any movie whose rating was higher than a set level. In response, they began encoding disks with a program that would pro-actively seek out the control settings on a player.

Unfortunately, the encoding was seriously flawed in that it wouldn't take "no" for an answer. If your DVD player could take parental controls, but you didn't have them set, the disk would keep searching for those settings. If you didn't pull your disk out in time, it'd actually damage the player. Making matters worse, the disks weren't labelled as having this feature; the only way to know if you had such a disk was to pop it in your player and wait for the protests.

I actually had a DVD player fall victim to this, and I was ultimately forced to go buy a new one.

did you get a refund? =O

[Fortress Ironhol...]

About 10 years ago, a number of DVD manufacturers tried something similar. DVD players were now being designed that had parental controls of their own, meaning that they wouldn't play any movie whose rating was higher than a set level. In response, they began encoding disks with a program that would pro-actively seek out the control settings on a player.

Unfortunately, the encoding was seriously flawed in that it wouldn't take "no" for an answer. If your DVD player could take parental controls, but you didn't have them set, the disk would keep searching for those settings. If you didn't pull your disk out in time, it'd actually damage the player. Making matters worse, the disks weren't labelled as having this feature; the only way to know if you had such a disk was to pop it in your player and wait for the protests.

I actually had a DVD player fall victim to this, and I was ultimately forced to go buy a new one.

did you get a refund? =O

I tried contacting the company who put out the movie, and was promptly ignored.

[Sobana]

At any rate, I hope these ground braking records encourage Hasbro to tack on a few more seasons! =D

[Fnu Aw]

They will as long as the show's ratings translate into toy sales, and so far that's been the case. It's pretty much their only girls brand that's doing particularly well right now. I doubt they're going to jinx it by cutting the show short.