Any ratings numbers on USA v. Mex?

I'm working on tracking those numbers down. Hopefully we'll have them soon.

 

I'm guessing more households watched the Telemundo broadcast. Too bad one broadcaster couldn't have both English and Spanish language rights and use the SAP function.
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Being at the stadium, I noticed the Mexican signboards on the bench side. This leads me to believe that the Mexicans used their own cameras from the far side of the field - to get their own advertising in. It would be interesting to know whether Telemundo used the Mexican "reverse angle" feed, or the ESPN feed.

If they used the reverse angle, it would've been cool to have both feeds on TVs next to eachother.

 

Telemundo took the ESPN feed with US sign boards.

Why? Telemundo viewers live in the US and spends money in the US.

I don't see SAP used in too many soccer/futbol telecasts in the US because the networks gain nothing from using them.

Spanish-language networks sell advertising based on the number of Hispanic viewers, not the total number of viewers. Doing SAP would not get them any extra advertising dollars.

English-language US networks simply sell blocks of time to promoters such as US Soccer/TWI/Nike and MLS/SUM. They can care less once the check clears.

 

The funniest thing was listening to the first half of that game on Radio Unica while I was driving home. I know some Spanish and you can pick up a sense of what's going on from inflection and stuff, but it was hilarious because the play-by-play guy would describe something, and then, instead of the color guy doing the customary analysis (or, in some cases, smartaleck remark, not that I'd know), he'd just jump in and read a live 8 second Tecate or Visa commercial. Then right back to the PBP.

Every now and then, they'd run a taped commercial, about 15 seconds worth. And every few minutes, just for laughs, they'd run a sounder that basically said you were listening to Radio Unica with Jorge Lopez (or whatever his name was), a real musical sounder like you hear in English language radio, and then right back to the game.

Interesting way to milk some advertising out of a broadcast.

 

MSG was pimping their Spanish feed of the Metros/United game, even doing a cut in with their Spanish PBP guy talking for a bit. It all comes down to rights fees and crossover interest in the two markets. I think Telemundo and Univision families are missing the boat when they get exclusive rights to some broadcasts in the US by not offering English language audio. Especially some of the CONCACAF youth tournaments and the FIFA Futsal stuff. I watched, even though I only know rudimentary espanol de futbol.

 

I can hardly take a corner kick anymoore without hearing the sexy-voiced Mexican girls chorus that used to sing 'tiro, tiro, tiro, desquiiiiiina' during their broadcasts. Imagine that ridiculous thing in English.

 

The USA/Mexico game did a 0.39 on ESPN2 with an estimated 327,612 households.

Just as a not-terribly-relevant comparison (different timeslot/competition, etc.), the highest-rated ESPN2 MLS telecast that I have from last season was a .31 for Chicago at Dallas on August 10, 2002.

 

That is an impressive number, seriously. I was worried that the game would only pull half that number, considering the competition and especially the simulcast on Telemundo.

 

Kenn,

How come we can usually find US ratings one ESPN2 but finding MLS ones are like looking for a needle in a haystack?

Andy

 

I actually said between a .2 and a .3 so a .39 looks pretty good to me!

Andy

 

Actually, you just have to know who to ask.

I figured that if the rating was decent-sized, that ESPN2 or USSF would put it out there. I figured that David Barron, the very good sports media columnist for the Houston Chronicle, would have it in his column on Friday.

But I asked my guy on the inside. He's also the guy who gave me all of last year's MLS ESPN2 ratings that I have on my site, but I can't go back to that well too often.

That's why I ask on my site that people who read any snippets of information send them to me, so that we can have a place to store all this stuff, so that in the future, when someone says ratings are up or down or whatever, we don't have to rely on memory or bookmarks or whatever.

 

I don't know but I think that's a pretty good number.

Doesn't include the 69,000 people inside the stadium either (obviously). I guess its not a good sign though when adding the actual crowd in attendance is a high % of the tv audience.

 

Actually, this lends to the argument that all TV ratings are way off and not accurate enough anymore.

 

Don't forget about Telemundo. The game had a split audience. Any numbers (ratings/households) from the Telemundo broadcast?

 

I'm curious as to what is lending to that argument (I'm not understanding what Northside is saying, I guess), and I'm not understanding how TV ratings could have gotten less accurate over time as technology has gotten more sophisticated.

And anybody with a guy on the inside at Telemundo, feel free. I'd imagine they did a very nice number.

 

kenn, I think he meant that if 70K would pay significant dollar to watch it in one city, you would think that somewhere around 100K would watch it for free(well assuming they already have cable ) in the other 10 cities or so of similar size. Add in suburbia numbers, and you get the idea.

Obviously, people probably travelled from all over the state to come to the game but it DOES seem odd to think that the actual number of people in attendence was about a fifth the size of the entire tv audience. ESPESCIALLY, when the event has no geographical appeal. Its not like this is two local teams playing each other.

Anyway, it seems like a decent number. I'm interested in the telemundo rating too.

 

It's a sampling issue. When there were three networks, the sampling from Nielsen boxes were as such where you could get a reasonably good estimation based on the Nielsen survey.

The problem occurs when you now have such a huge number of viewing options. Statistically speaking, it will be very difficult to get an accurate read on "lesser viewed" options because you're drawing from such a small sample.

Let's do some math. From the numbers listed, lets assume there were roughly 84 million american households with their televisions on at the time of the game. Let's then assume that 4,110 of those households have Nielsen boxes (Nielsen says there's 5,000 national Nielsen families and a bit above 100 million households in the US. Doing some math with the numbers given, that's where that 84 million is coming from). A .39 share (which equals .39%) would mean that of those 4,110 Nielsen families, 16 watched USA v. Mexico (and the common sense inclined people amongst you can already see the problem now). That means that the estimate of 327,612 households is derived from extrapolating those 16 people to the rest of the population (IE assuming that the same percentage of people are watching USA/Mex with or without Nielsen boxes).

The problem is, of course, that an elementary course in probability can tell you that's not even close to a safe assumption. Let's assume 430,000 Americans watched USA v. Mexico on ESPN2 instead of the 327,612 given. Here's the question? What are the chances that if 4,110 of the 84 million in the sample are selected completely at random, that 16 or less would have on the US/Mex game (16 being the number needed to get a .0039 share for an est. 327,612 and lower indicating an even lower estimated number)? It turns out there's a 17% chance that if the actual audience was 30% higher than that 327,612 number given, it still would have registered only a .0039 and given that 327,612 as an estimate.

And therein lies the problem. If you look at a show like Friends, let's say it draws a 21 share on that same night. That means 863 people of the 4,110 watched Friends. This would translate to about 17.6 million viewers estimated. Let's say the actual number of viewers was higher at 19.3 million, 9.7% higher. What are the chances of Friends getting a 21 share or lower (and thus an estimate of 17.6 million estimated or lower) if 19.3 million watched? Not very good; only .1% or 1 in a 1,000. So it is quite unlikely that Friends' actual viewership is 9.7% higher than estimated, but it is well within the realms of possibility that 30% more people watched USA v. Mex than estimated.

And thus the problem. There are not enough Nielsen families to give us the kind of accuracy we'd like for programs with ratings in the range given. That .39 could just as likely be .54 or .24, so it what it tells about viewership is extremely limited. If the next US/Mex game grabs a .54 in the ratings, people will say "it's up 38%" but in actuality it might not be up at all or could be up much greater than 38%.

Nielsen ratings are not useful for lesser watched programs. As currently constructed, they are only really useful for prime time network programming, and even then I think their value are grossly overstated (but I won't go into my "marketing as pseudo-science" spiel).

 

That actually made sense to me. I need to seek help immediately.

So ratings at the low end of the scale are potentially (and probably) less accurate than those at the top of the scale. Which makes sense. And it's perpetuated because no one really cares if USA/Mexico got a .24 or a .54 (except us) because the real money is with Friends and ER and Joe Millionaire.

My cable company just sent me a copy of their privacy policy, which says they can and do keep track of what you're viewing. I would think that digital cable (and I don't know how many cable households in the cable universe are digital) providers could get some pretty accurate data and create their own clearinghouse for it and tell Nielsen to go pound sand.

Still, intuitively, it makes sense that more people would have watched USA/Mexico than would watch your run-of-the-mill MLS game.

 

Well, yes and no. On an absolute scale, no. I mean Friends being off by a million viewers certainly is more than El Classico being off by 150,000. But on the level at which we as humans think about things and make evaluations, and on the level of comparisons to "baselines" (which, might I add, is a critical missing component in the Nielsen system), those 150,000 are infinitely more significant to El Classico than the million is to Friends.

I forgot to mention (but this is crucial) that a major weakness of the Nielsen system is that it's not a completely new and random 5,000 people every week. The reason why the ratings for lower rated shows seem consistent (and you can check MLS' ratings as an example) is that it's the same damn people watching them every week. If you drew a completely new set of people every week (logisitically impossible under the current system), what you'd see is these ratings jump all over the place for often no good reason. As an example, if the 16 of the 4,110 become 18 next time the rating jumps to .44 and if it becomes 14 it drops to .0034, but the chances of this being simply a random sampling issue are unquestionably likely.

Right. The problem with Nielsen in determining whether USA/Mex drew 300,000 or 500,000 viewers is that it's like trying to pick up ball bearings wearing an oven mitt. The tool being used is not precise enough for the job. It can accurately tell you that Friends got a ton more viewers than US/Mex, but that's not exactly hard to do (ask a random person who Jennifer Aniston is and then ask who Landon Donovan is).

Ah, but you've missed the brilliance of the Nielsen system. For the main principles involved, the relative accuracy of the Nielsen system is immaterial. They don't really care how accurate Nielsen is. What matters is that all parties involved more or less accept Nielsen as being "as accurate as it needs to be" and sufficient for basing advertising rates on with the bonus that the numbers come dirt cheap (no spending money on fancy new technology and research). The networks don't care whether it's 17 million or 19 million watching Friends as long as they can charge advertisers as if it were 19 million regardless. For their part, advertising companies are simply trying to sell their services to companies. They can simply point to Nielsen and say "those are the numbers" and move on. Nielsen certainly enjoys it's status and isn't going to come out and say that it's methods no longer apply to the new viewing environment with 100s of channels to choose from.

So Nielsen is perfectly satisfactory for basing advertising rates on. It's just a bit lacking in measuring viewership. None of the principles can see a dime of profit coming from a new, more accurate system, so such a system is useless. Nielsen is institutionalized: "the Nielsens are what we base advertising rates on, and everyone involved seems to agree that doing so is fine with them."

Nevertheless, Nielsen Research saw this one coming long before you did and have positioned themselves accordingly so that they (and not the cable companies) are in the best position to capitalize if such a system would be feasible (though at the moment WRT digital cable there could me a major problem with representativeness of the sample). This is where eventually the ratings will head, once enough people (from a range of various backgrounds) receive their TV signals from a source capable of being measured this way.

We won't even go into the pile of crap known as "sweeps" and how it manages to muddy already seriously brown waters.

Of course, more people did: maybe 9 of the 4,110 watch MLS and 16 watched USA/Mex. What this tells you about overall viewership isn't all that much. However, the information you already possess that USA/Mex should draw more viewers than MLS is infinitely better evidence that it will do so than the Nielsens. Plus the fact that three times as many fans showed up for it live as any MLS game this season is a TON better statistical sample in support of that theory than the Nielsens are.

IOW, Nielsens are unlikely to tell you anything about that question you didn't already know.

And, of course, Telemundo's ratings matter here too, but trying to ascertain what they would mean specifically for _US_ soccer is problematic.

 

The 0.39 is a cable channel rating, with the divisor being the number of homes that receive ESPN2 (about 84 million).

If you use 107 million households as your divisor to come up with a NATIONAL rating, the national rating for US-Mexico on ESPN2 is only 0.306, which is pretty much in line with Andy's 0.3 prediction.

The cable industry prefer to use cable ratings because the cable ratings are calculated with a smaller divisor.

When comparing ratings across networks, always use NATIONAL ratings. Otherwise, you can't make accurate comparisons. This is especially important for smaller channels with less than 40 million households.

So the bottom line: US-Mexico on ESPN2 did a 0.306 national rating with approximately 328000 households.

Given that the match also aired on Telemundo with an anticipated audience of approximately 700000 Hispanic households, 328000 households on ESPN2 isn't that bad an audience for a meaningless friendly.

 

At a seminar where we were being pitched network time over cable time, we were told that a a 1.0 and a 0.1 are the same because once you get below a 1.0, it's all conjecture.

 

Which makes sense.

Thanks, voros.

So the bottom line is: not a lot of people watch soccer on television in this country unless it's the World Cup. Somehow I think I already knew that.

Good points about Nielsen's institutionalization. Seems like the only people who'd be pushing for more accurate TV ratings would be the people trying to convince advertisers to spend money on things that get low ratings, in hopes they could find that they've been under-estimated for years.

I'll be very interested to see if we ever hear the results of the TiVo/Nielsen comparison experiment.