Spring Break
Soap fades from TV guided by brutal economics
MCT
Issue date: 4/7/09 Section: Features
CBS announced last week that it is pulling the plug on "Guiding Light" in September, after 57 years on TV, and 15 years before that on radio. Created in Chicago by Irna Phillips, the daytime drama is an institution. Yet the ax long was poised to fall.
Despite a production overhaul that gave "Light" a more realistic feel, one-quarter fewer women age 18 to 49 -- the target demographic -- are watching it compared to 12 months ago and overall viewership is off 18 percent. All told, the show is averaging just 2.17 million viewers.
Two days before CBS' announcement that it was washing its hands of the Procter & Gamble-owned soap, The New York Times ran a story on rising Fox News Channel star Glenn Beck.
"Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon," it said. "It typically draws about 2.3 million viewers."
The chasm between failure and phenom is far wider than the couple hundred thousand viewers -- and three letters -- that separate "GL" and Glenn.
Numbers still matter in media, just not the same numbers -- and buzz often translates to biz.
"Everything has become hypertargeted," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research for Horizon Media. "There are a lot of different water-cooler shows for a lot of different ages, and certain people will talk about certain shows. Men and women of various age groups and various ethnic groups talking about the same show doesn't happen anymore."
"Even 'American Idol' is down," Adgate said. "And there's not a show that does more than 20 million anymore except 'American Idol' or maybe 'Dancing With the Stars,' depending on the night, and 20 million people sounds big, but that's only 6 (percent) or 7 percent of the country."
The laws of physics don't change: Mass times acceleration still equals force.
But with audiences splintering across an ever-widening spectrum of content, individual mass media outlets simply don't have as much mass as they used to, leaving acceleration to pick up the slack -- and it's the speed with which word of that content travels rather than the content itself that creates the impact.
Despite a production overhaul that gave "Light" a more realistic feel, one-quarter fewer women age 18 to 49 -- the target demographic -- are watching it compared to 12 months ago and overall viewership is off 18 percent. All told, the show is averaging just 2.17 million viewers.
Two days before CBS' announcement that it was washing its hands of the Procter & Gamble-owned soap, The New York Times ran a story on rising Fox News Channel star Glenn Beck.
"Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon," it said. "It typically draws about 2.3 million viewers."
The chasm between failure and phenom is far wider than the couple hundred thousand viewers -- and three letters -- that separate "GL" and Glenn.
Numbers still matter in media, just not the same numbers -- and buzz often translates to biz.
"Everything has become hypertargeted," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research for Horizon Media. "There are a lot of different water-cooler shows for a lot of different ages, and certain people will talk about certain shows. Men and women of various age groups and various ethnic groups talking about the same show doesn't happen anymore."
"Even 'American Idol' is down," Adgate said. "And there's not a show that does more than 20 million anymore except 'American Idol' or maybe 'Dancing With the Stars,' depending on the night, and 20 million people sounds big, but that's only 6 (percent) or 7 percent of the country."
The laws of physics don't change: Mass times acceleration still equals force.
But with audiences splintering across an ever-widening spectrum of content, individual mass media outlets simply don't have as much mass as they used to, leaving acceleration to pick up the slack -- and it's the speed with which word of that content travels rather than the content itself that creates the impact.
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