Ratings: The Weekend November 18th & 19th, 2006

The only story from Saturday night was that Saturday Night College Football reigned supreme, as ABC sacked the competition in every hour of prime-time.

Sunday night showed a little more competition for the alphabet network, but building a strong audience in the second half hour last night was ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition with CBS, NBC & FOX all tying for second in the 8 o’clock hour. The crypt keepers of Wisteria Lane are holding on to 20% of all audiences in their time slot and acting as a solid lead in to Brothers & Sisters which surprisingly is finding an audience securing ABC’s title as most viewed network for the both the night and the weekend.

Find the weekend ratings roundup of the Neilsen ratings (18-49 demo) after the jump. . .

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.