Last night CBS attracted an average of 106.5 million viewers during its transmission of Super Bowl XLIV, which effectively made it the most watched broadcast program of all time. While the Super Bowl has always been a major broadcast event in the United States its average audience has been growing steadily at around 2.3% since [...]

Last week Ad Age posted the spot prices for the new Fall’s season, based on a “survey of media buying firms.” Combining this information with ratings data for the top 20 programs I compiled approximate CPMs (Cost per Thousand) for the overall audience and the 18-49 demographic.
Most advertisers are not focused on overall audience, since [...]

A couple of article last week about network television caught my eye. One article in The Economist looked at how the ratings have declined during the past ten years for the ‘big four’ networks. Most spectacular has been NBC’s drop; their ratings are about half they were 10 years ago. CBS and ABC have fared [...]

During my last posting I took a look at the audience levels for the Academy Awards since 1974. Since I had the data handy I decided to compare the viewing trends to the Superbowl.

Superbowl XLIII is less than five days away and I am looking forward more to the commercials than the game itself . A Superbowl commercial has be better than the game since it has only 30 seconds to grab a viewer’s attention and be as memorable as any play or touchdown that occurs that night. [...]