Reports are surfacing around the interwebs suggesting that last week’s abysmal viewership for the Thanksgiving episode of iMPACT! may be slightly improved – thanks to DVRs.
Initial reports told us that last week’s episode of the show averaged about 1,262,000 viewers throughout the two hour episode. After including DVR viewership, though, it is being reported that last week’s episode averaged about 1,400,000 viewers. While the 138,000 viewer bump isn’t even close to the 200,000 bump that iMPACT!’s viewership normally receives after adding in DVRs, this lesser increase may be due to the holiday lag and folks not being home to watch the show.
Additionally, the Thanksgiving episode of ReAction increased its final audience from 681,000 viewers to 708,000 viewers after adding in those who watched the show on DVR.
I don’t think it is really that necessary whether DVR increased iMPACT’s rating or not. It kind of makes us TNA fans look like we’re grasping on straws for bigger ratings (no offence guys).
Thanks for the feedback Radiitz but I guess I disagree. I don’t see it as grasping at straws. The numbers are what they are. Those additional viewers did watch iMPACT! The purpose of reporting the ratings is to give an idea of how many people are watching TNA each week.
If you leave out the DVR numbers you aren’t getting the complete picture and that is what the report is about giving you the reader the complete story, not inflating. If the numbers are low Joe gives you the numbers, if they are high you still get the numbers. It’s all about reporting the viewership however high or low it is.
Yeah – if I was trying to grasp at straws, I’d only add these posts when the DVR+3 numbers are good for the company. Plus, news is news and viewership is news. Frankly, if this was WWEStars.com, then I’d be reporting DVR numbers for RAW and Smackdown!, too.
Ultimately, what I’d like to see is some type of report that finds a way to measure all of the views for the show on Spike.com, too. I’ve already made it known to my friends and family that when I move out of my current townhouse in the next year or two, I’m not getting a cable subscription. Instead, I’m going to watch my favorite shows online (and I don’t have many favorite shows). For TNA, that means that I’ll see iMPACT! a day or two late, but for free on Spike.com:
http://www.spike.com/full-episode/whos-wearing-stripes/40994
You can see from the current episode that’s posted on there that nearly 11,000 people have watched this week’s episode of iMPACT! so far on the website. I guess there’s no easy way to figure out how many of them are duplicates, but it would be awesome to have the data that Spike has on total viewership (online viewers, first-run cable viewers, DVR+3, and DVR+7 viewers).
And again, I’d report this information (if it were available) for all of the wrestling promotions.
Okay guys. Keep up the good work anyway!
You know we will!
Actually, what I’d like to get my hands on are the buy rates for the pay-per-views. It seems like everyone on the internet (with our accumulated ZERO experience in the wrestling world) thinks that TNA Wrestling should reduce its pay-per-view schedule to four shows per year. However, if the promotion hasn’t done that yet I wonder how many buys they’re getting each month.
That data would tell us a lot, I think.