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for reality TV shows
Steep audience drops could prove life-shortening
By Kevin Downey
The reality show genre, just two years ago seen as the resuscitator of broadcast TV, has been in doubtful health, and of late there are growing indications that it could be fading faster than many TV suits would like advertisers to believe.
The death rattles, or what sound like death rattles, can be found in key audience ratings.
Last Thursday’s 8.3 adult 18-49 rating for the first half-hour of "Survivor: Marquesas" premiere, while strong, came nowhere close to the 13.2 rating for NBC’s "Friends." Just a year ago the CBS reality show featuring the rat-eating antics of adventuresome suburbanites was regularly beating the NBC sitcom.
The recently concluded "Temptation Island 2" on Fox had an audience of only 6.1 million for its finale compared to the 17.5 million who watched the conclusion of the first season of the show.
Even NBC’s "Fear Factor," which has an audience of about 13 million, is slipping at No. 25 for the season among the most-watched programs.
Part of the problem is that the audience that the reality shows first attracted, leading network suits to think they had found the antidote to viewer flight to cable, is by its nature difficult to hold.
It is the young, affluent and largely suburban crowd advertisers most desire to reach.
"The networks are targeting an audience that doesn’t watch a lot of TV, so it’s an iffy proposition," says Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director at Horizon Media.
"I don’t see a lot of reality shows making it, but there could be a few even if they become a passing fad in a few years."
The key issue for advertisers is whether, as overall audiences decline, the shows are able to hold on to a sufficient share of those young, affluent viewers.
If the young flee, with the effect that a show skews older and older, as the hit ABC game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" did, cancellations will abound.
"The networks will be more willing to hold onto a show that delivers a lower household rating but is targeted to a demographic for which they can command a premium cost," says Adgate.
Last season, reality shows helped the networks, CBS in particular, by both lowering the median age and raising the median household income of viewers.
The median age of CBS’s audience dropped by more than a year last season, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by Magna Global USA.
"Survivor’s" audience, which had a median age of 39.6, was about 12 years younger than that of average CBS viewers.
Moreover, "Survivor" is CBS’s youngest-skewing show, as "The Mole" was ABC’s youngest show, and as "Fear Factor" is one of NBC’s youngest programs. Even Fox’s "Temptation Island" was among the youngest-skewing shows on its already young-skewing lineup.
Perhaps of greater importance to advertisers has been the power of reality shows to pull in affluent audiences.
With "Survivor," the median household income of CBS’s adult 18-49 audience went up 17 percent last season, to $58,100.
And some reality shows, "Survivor" in particular, had among the highest median incomes of all shows, although most fell more than $10,000 short of top shows, like "The West Wing" and "Friends."
The networks can be expected to do whatever is needed, reinventing the reality genre where they can, to lure back those sought-after viewers.
"The broadcast audience is getting more fractionalized, so one way to stand out is by focusing on median age or median income," says Adgate.
"It’s becoming more important as media get more niche-oriented and there are more competitors out there."
March 4, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
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