Nielsen Ratings: Thursday December 7, 2006

Surviving a strong showing from MY NAME IS EARL on Thursday was CBS’ SURVIVOR pulling in 15% of the market in major demos. Turns out a rerun of UGLY BETTY is a beautiful thing for the Disney network showing high marks and grabbing 3rd place for the house that Mickey built. One in five Americans tuned in to CSI to learn who the miniature killer was Thursday night and there was a nationwide sigh of “that was lame” when the highly creative season long plot line died quicker than a really bad analogy drawn out to long by madeyoulaugh on tvgasm…wait what? Viewers are eating up SHARK, which took the number two spot at 10 o’clock falling short of ER numbers. And in other news, seriously, there’s some show on called MEN IN TREES.

How do I read these ratings?

A Nielsen rating may look like this:



8pm – NBC – TVgasm The TV Show – 10.0/18

Focus on the 10.0/18. The RATING, 10.0, on the left represents the actual number of households that watched a show. One rating point equals 1,102,000 households. The SHARE, 18, on the right represents the show’s proportion of the total households watching television at that time.

For example, TVgasms TV Show has a 10 rating/18 share. That means 11,020,000 households are tuned in to the show and 18% of all the households with a TV turned on are watching that show.

Ratings and Share are customarily broken down for various DEMOs — a demographic grouping of viewers, like 18-49 adults or 2-12 children or 18-34 women, etc. Advertisers, and therefore networks, covet the 18-49 adult demo, and so tend to concentrate on that number.