ESPN2 has also had its run of Beckham-fueled luck. Even when Beckham didn’t play as scheduled Aug. 5 in Toronto, 296,000 homes were watching. Four days later, for a game against D.C. United, 111,000 more homes were viewing. At TeleFutura, for which the SuperLiga is tailor-made, the Galaxy-D.C. United semifinal on Wednesday drew 562,000, fewer than the 644,000 who watched Houston play Pachuca in a semifinal the night before. Saturday night’s Galaxy-Red Bulls game was of enough interest to MSG, the New York team’s local carrier, to secure the rights to show a 60-minute replay version tonight at 9 and 11 p.m. and Wednesday at noon, 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. It will do the same thing within days of ESPN2’s showing of the Red Bulls’ final regular-season game Oct. 18 against Los Angeles. “These games will be the pinnacle because of Beckham’s star power,” said Michael Bair, the president of MSG Media. “It’s rare for networks to be so cooperative, but we called them and they saw the value of this right away.” Red Bulls games don’t attract many local viewers, but one with Beckham, even if it is three days old, could bring in substantially more. This season, the team is averaging a meager 1,031 households on MSG and FSNY, which is still 40 percent higher than last year’s 736. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/sports/soccer/21sandomir.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
^^^ I find it very hard to believe that only 1000 famillies watch RB play. especially when about 10K show up for games regulary.
they get these numbers from where? the average household with a nielsen box? the average family watches mlb, nfl, etc. they don't watch soccer. or do they put it in the average latino family? which watches mfl, mlb, etc. i don't think these numbers mean anything, other than the ability to attract sponsors. our team is owned by its own sponsor...so i'm not worried.
Those numbers sound downright impossible. It's a metro area of over 22 million people. 1031 TVs are left on MSG every night by accident when people fall asleep in front of them.
I agree, there's no way that's right. Not to mention the fact that at a minimum, 10,000 show up to our matches. How do Nielsen ratings work anyway? I have FiOS, is that a Nielsen box?
There is no such thing as a Nielson Box. They use diaries and telephone polling to determine their ratings.
Those numbers are total BS. I'm sure I'm not the only season ticket holder who goes to the games and then goes home to watch all the botched ref calls again on TiVO (most of them, that is - I couldn't bear to watch the loss to Chivas a second time). And I watch all of the away games as well.
i always watch the games on tv, even if i go to them live. i like to rewatch them on tv....makes it so much better.
They definately exist. The "boxes" most people refer to are formally called set meters. They plug into the tv and transmit data through phone lines.
Actually, it's quite believable. A couple of years ago, I went to a sports management seminar hosted by a number of owners of minor-league baseball teams. Teams like the Somerset Patriots and New Jersey Jackals, etc. I asked the General Managers, "Have you done any research to find out how many of your ticket buyers are hardcore baseball fans and how many are just out for an afternoon of entertainment?" The answer was, "We've done extensive demographic studies and we have found that only 9% of our ticket-buyers are hardcore baseball fans who show up for the baseball. The other 91% are a combination of group-sale folks from churches and company outings, and families just looking for a daytrip." Therefore if the Red Bulls only average 11,000 fans per game in the stadium, it is not hard to believe that there are only about 1000 hardcore Red Bulls fans amongst them. In other words, it is likely that 10,000 of the 11,000 are just folks out for an afternoon of entertainment. And therefore it is highly unlikely that those folks are going to watch away games on TV. In other, other words, averaging 1000 per TV broadcast is entirely believable...unfortunately. Those are the 1000 passionate Red Bulls fans in the New York area. Horrific, no?
dont forget msg show sanything over the rb games..liberty, whatever is going on at msg will always have precedence to rb games..
Well, first of all we can all ignore Wandering Soccerdog's trolling post above, given his obsessive history of trolling this board attacking anything that threatens the memory of his beloved Cosmos. It still baffles me that our forum is the only one that allows such trolls to come here and attack our team regularly, but that is a topic for another thread. As for the lies in the post, the idea that the TV audience for a sport regularly amounts to 10% of the average attendance for the sport on a major cable channel is so obviously preposterous that I am actually surprised that he didn't try to troll here with something more believable. As for the number itself, unfortunately it shows the innumeracy that is too typical in the media. TV ratings, whether through Nielsen or another firm, are a sample of a vastly greater population. Even if you assume that your sample population is identical to the larger population (which isn't true with TV ratings, btw, which have traditionally undercounted Hispanic households), there is a sampling error margin based on the sample size and the size of the overall population. Now for the top shows in the area, such as a Yankees baseball game, this margin of error isn't as important, since it might mean that a 3.1 rating was really 2.9 or vice versa. But when you are looking at less popular shows, the error becomes huge as a percentage of the audience. No one is claiming that Red Bull games are drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers, but the range is undoubtedly such that it is absolute nonsense to say "1,031" households are watching. Statistically speaking, you could just as accurately say that there were 0 homes watching. If you took a national poll of 1000 random Americans asking them if they supported Manchester United, do you know what the result would be - zero (plus or minus the margin or error). And within that margin of error would be enough fans to make millions for Man Utd. when they tour the US. Unfortunately, very few in the media seem to have ever taken a statistics course. It is even worse when political polling is done. If a poll last week showed that Hillary was leading Obama, 49-44, and one this week shows it tied 45-45, you will read stories about how Hillary is "fading" and Obama "surging" due to some issue. They will neglect to mention that the polls had a margin of error of +/- 5%, which means that both results are statistically identical. As for the number itself being wrong, given that there are hundreds of members of the ESC, RB Nation, Kearny Army, etc, alone, along with a few thousand other season ticket holders who actually pay to go to every game, the idea that not only are they not watching away games, but no one else in a metropolitan area of 20 million is either is so obviously wrong that the reporter must have used it under the idea that "Oh, its a number so it must be right. And it ends in "1", so it must be really accurate". Hell, I'll bet that there are more people than that watching RBNY games on mlslive.tv every week. But for the RBNY trolls and general soccer bashers, they now have another bit of ammo. And it was in the New York Times, so it must be right.
By the way, I should add that the "good news" in the story is also nonsense. Given that both results are undoubtedly within the margin of error, you cannot say that ratings are "up 40% this year". All you can say is that they were somewhere within the margin of error last year and are somewhere within the margin of error this year. Based on the data, they could have even gone down. Given sampling error, there is simply no way to know.
Set meters aren't used to determine ratings. They simply monitor what times of the day a TV is turned on how oftern the channel is changes and what duration it stays on. They can't tell what channel you are watching, what program you are watching, and what the gender/age of the viewers is. This is the data that advertisers want. The only way they can reliably determine ratings is by have people fill out diaries. For prime-time shows on the major networks Nielson uses telephone polling.
I had two TVs on last night for the "RB in 60" replay of the Galaxy match, just in case some kind of voodoo system they have can monitor my watching.
Great idea DrK, next game on MSG I am putting the game on all my TVs, we will have that number up above 1,040 in no time.
Generally speaking, yeah, RB doesnt have much hard core support. Still though, doesn't a 1000 people seem a little light? It does to me.
The idea is not that the TV audience for "a" sport regularly amounts to 10% of the average attendance; the idea is that the TV audience for "OUR" sport -- more specifically our "TEAM" -- regularly amounts to 10% of the average attendance. Question: What is the purpose of televising sporting events? Answer: The purpose is to bring the game into people's homes who could not get into the stadium. But if there are regularly 65,000 empty seats in Giants Stadium, that logically means that, for the most part, anyone who wants to see the game is already there. (Don't bore me with posts about how y'all were at your mother-in-law's house for the weekend and couldn't get to the game. I'm talking about mass market broadcasting, not the one-off fanatic who misses a game due to a prior commitment.) This is one of the reasons that when the league began in 1996, I pushed the idea that all home games should not be televised. Total blackout. No tape delay, nothing. This is what the Cosmos did successfully, back in the day. No home games were televised, only away games. What that policy did was create demand for tickets. If you wanted to see the Cosmos game at home, you had to get off your rump and go to the stadium. The policy worked. But with the Red Bulls, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for relatively free? Home games are televised, so there isn't a demand created for fans to go to the stadium. And then the television cameras show a gazillion empty seats, which creates the impression that nobody cares about this team, and then the downward spiral continues, and fewer and fewer people show up...unless a major celebrity-player or celebrity-team shows up. In other words, the game the other night would have been a complete sellout had Fox Soccer Channel been blacked out in the New York area. And the additional 55,000 fans who came to the stadium were not hardcore soccer fans, they were Beckham fans. Similarly, back in the day, there were people who came to Cosmos games not because they were hardcore soccer fans, but because they were people who loved the power of the event. The "Cosmos" were bigger than "soccer." "Beckham" is bigger than soccer. "Manchester United" is bigger than soccer. The same way the "Yankees" are bigger than "baseball." But the "Red Bulls" are not bigger than soccer. The "Red Bulls" only regularly attract 10,000 daytrippers and 1000 hardcore soccer fanatics. Those 1000 hardcore soccer fanatics are the average TV audience. The question remains, how do we make this franchise bigger than "soccer"? Again, it's not just about winning. We've proven that already. It's about four things (not necessarily in this order): 1) winning 2) star-quality 3) name-brand recognition, and 4) the power of tradition and myth. The Yankees have all four. The Red Bulls have just one right now: winning. Until we get the other three, there will only be 1000 hardcore soccer fanatics who regularly watch local broadcasts of Red Bulls games.
The number of Red Bulls fans in Manhattan who can't be bothered to take a bus out to Giants Stadium and say that they just watch the games on TV certainly numbers much more than 1,000 alone. There's probably 1,000 of them posting on this board at any given moment.
What do you mean "our" team, troll? You only come here to attack our team and bore us all with your Cosmos references. I still have no idea why you haven't been carded and thrown out of here long ago. Oh come on, even you aren't this stupid. You can't be this stupid. No one is this stupid. DC fans aren't even this stupid. You really think that the only people who watch sporting events on TV are those who couldn't get tickets for the game? That no one might decide to watch a game for free in the comfort of his living room rather than drive or take the bus to Giants Stadium, pay for tickets, and then spend hours going to and from the game? Every game in every sport must have lousy ratings, then, if a game isn't sold out. If the Mets draw 45,000 to a game then no one is watching since they could have "just gone to the game" if they were interested. Not only is such a lack of logic a clear sign of trolling, it is really, really bad trolling. Even you can do better than this. Ah, good, I was afraid that you were going to forget to include the Cosmos reference. By the way, if I created a sockpuppet called "DiplomatsRule" and started posting on the DC board about how everything about DC United sucks, how they won't get sellouts until they dump Gomez and sign a "real" star like the Diplomats did, and how they will always suck until they do everything just like the NASL, how many posts would I get until I was banned? I would put the over/under at 5. Maybe now we can have Golazo68 come in and tell us how the TV ratings are lousy because we didn't sign a big enough DP, followed by a certain former supporter posting about how the TV ratings are poor because we are named for an energy drink. Let's see if we can get the trifecta in play.