Dollhouse

It’s April, which means fans of imperiled TV shows are once again circling the megaphones. Every spring, fans rise up from their La-Z-Boys demanding that their favorite programs stay on the air. This year it’s fans of Chuck, Fringe, Dollhouse, and others who are organizing get-out-the-remote campaigns, petitioning the network overlords who control the shows’ fate. Once they tire of genuflecting to the suits in the corner offices, the fans turn to their friends, determined to rope them into the protest. These friends, of course, have no dog in the fight, which only makes the rabid fans more determined to force their pals in front of a TV to watch the show. Then bloggers take up the cause, which lends an air of legitimacy to the whole grass-roots affair. As the network execs debate whether to renew a series, everybody figures that the more people who watch, the better.

This approach couldn’t be more wrong-headed. Trying to convince more people to watch a struggling show on TV is entirely useless. The television industry is not a democracy; the only votes that count—scratch that, the only people allowed to vote at all—are the 12,000 to 37,000 households that have Nielsen boxes sitting above their TVs. Nielsen boxes are poll stations for the Nielsen company—the organization that reports all of the ratings for the television industry. If Nielsen doesn’t know you exist, then neither do the TV networks. And if the TV networks don’t know you exist, then tuning in to an endangered show is a waste of everyone’s time. If a show is turned on and Nielsen isn’t there to hear it, it most definitely does not make a sound.

This is why "save our show" campaigns would be wise to stop telling people to watch more TV. They should start telling people to watch more TV online. Quantcast

The television business rests upon the central lie that it knows what you’re watching. In the old days, it was impossible for the network to keep track of who was watching what. So, instead, Nielsen started asking a sample of Americans to keep diaries of their television use. Eventually, that methodology largely evolved to a digital one, involving a box that transmits a viewing log back to Nielsen HQ. But the country has only somewhere between 12,000 and 37,000 homes reporting back with data. Compare that with the more than 112 million television-equipped households in this country. Now, even if we assume that these Nielsen readings are accurate—and there are many who believe that’s not the case—the huge gap between 12,000 and 112 million means almost everyone is stripped of an actual voice in the process.

So unless you’re a Nielsen household, the networks have no idea if you’re bingeing on Bravo’s Top Chef or crying through ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The number of viewers that is reported in the press—the 24.4 million people who watch American Idol, say—is extrapolated from the readings from those Nielsen boxes. The "save our show" campaigns are ill-advised because they fail to take into account this all-important gap between the sample size and the size of the sampled audience.

The alternative is to drive people where they can actually be counted—and these days that’s online. The Internet offers metrics everywhere you turn. The networks can analyze the number of streams, number of ad impressions, number of page views, number of visits, number of visitors, number of comments, etc. It’s a democratic space where the eyes and participation of fans can actually be seen by the network bosses making the decisions. Unlike with analog TV, online fans can actually speak directly to power. So whether it’s through iTunes, Hulu, or one of the networks’ proprietary streams, the smart way to campaign for a show’s renewal is to stream it after the fact. Detractors suggest that iTunes streams won’t get the attention of the networks because the $1.99 fee for an episode doesn’t equal the kind of ad revenue that’s generated on TV. But they fail to recognize that the ad rates are based on Nielsen numbers. And those Nielsen numbers are based on Nielsen households. And Nielsen households exclude 112 million of us, give or take a few thousand. So it’s worth it for non-Nielsens to go to iTunes and abandon the ad-supported TV broadcasts. The networks will never notice they’re gone.

There are other options with easily measured metrics, like DVD sales, but streams are still the easiest way to go. It’s free for everybody, which means the casual fan can access it without investment. Plus, the networks are currently flummoxed over the future of Web video, hoping to find breakout hits online that they can then sell to advertisers. Much of Lost’s street cred within ABC comes from its top-streaming status on ABC.com—this despite its steadily declining ratings on analog TV—which makes it attractive to advertisers catering to a young, Web-savvy audience. When a network is deciding whether to renew a show, it’s not just how many people watch it, it’s also whether it’s an attractive sell to ad companies. Carving out a niche online means a show has a defining identity—the kind of thing that’s necessary when a network is making the decision of whether to replace it with a new, unproven show next season.

While we’re pushing new eyes online, why not push everybody there? If you really want ensure a TV show’s success, stop watching TV altogether. After all, they say that you can’t complain if you don’t vote.