Wednesday, December 06, 2006

The Top 10 TV Shows According To Internet Buzz

Some company named Brandintel claims to be able to measure Internet buzz and chatter about TV shows. There's only a brief description of how they do it (they gather info from 4.2 million internet search hits), but assuming it's valid this is a nice way for networks to see what sort of talk their new shows are generating online. Not surprisingly, "Heroes" is easily the most discussed show online among the new series to debut this fall. Happily, "Friday Night Lights" is rising in buzz as well. Here's the top 10 shows in online buzz; it doesn't seem there's any attempt to measure whether people are saying good or bad things about the show. (About 21 new shows debuted this fall.) The previous ranking is how the shows were being buzzed about BEFORE their debut,so you can see the anticipation for them and what shows delivered.

1. Heroes -- 25.4% of online buzz (#2 during the summer)
2. Ugly Betty -- 14.1% of online buzz (#5 during the summer)
3. Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip -- 10.2% of online buzz (#1 during the summer)
4. Jericho -- 6.1% of online buzz (#6 during the summer)
5. Shark -- 5.8% of online buzz (#14 during the summer)
6. Friday Night Lights -- 5.3% of online buzz (#7 during the summer)
7. 30 Rock -- 4.4% of online buzz (N/A)
8. The Nine (cancelled) -- 3.7% of online buzz (N/A)
9. Brothers & Sisters -- 3% of online buzz (N/A)
10. Standoff -- 2.8% of online buzz (#20 during the summer)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's obvious that demographics are going to play a huge part into how much nets would pay attention to anything like this, but the demographics go so much further than "internet user that searches for shows." Internet user that searched via google, aol, yahoo or msn? I think it's also interesting that many of these shows have intriguing concepts for their plots, which is contradictory to the actual outcome of the program (Studio 60 and 30 Rock being obvious ones).

Michael in New York said...

Yep and while online users looking to read about and discuss tv shows online are certain to fall in the 18-34 range, that happens to be the very demographic networks court w a frenzy, as if people who were 50 didn't make money and spend it. But the paramters for this list are so vague and the task so impossible, I agree the list should be taken with a really big grain of salt.

Anonymous said...

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your interest in our TV report and your post. Actually, there is quite a lot from a process standpoint that goes into the ranking of the shows, including using both discussion share and sentiment scoring based on key attributes. I'd be happy to discuss further our methodology that leverages both patent-pending, proprietary search technology as well as over 400 human data analysts to ensure data reliability. You can also visit the technology section on our Website for more information www.brandintel.com.

Michael in New York said...

Hi Maxine, thanks for the post. That's some serious surfing to find my comments. I was of course reacting to the info supplied by a third party -- the news article -- as opposed to info you provide. Though presumably your info is proprietary to a degree. I'll look at your website more thoroughly. You have 400 human analysts devoted to this one project? Or for the company as a whole. Interesting project, though again, trying to take a snapshot of the Internet and rank all the discussions about primetime tv can't help but seem gargantuan, thanks to all the silly blogs like mine that have proliferated. Literally millions of blogs, plus MySpace pages to comb through from the past five months to come up with a definitive ranking of what generated the most talk? That's an exponentially more complicated task than what Nielsen does and if you can accomplish it, you'll be very wealthy indeed.