Big Picture: Why is understanding television consumption important?
For producers and creators of television shows it is important to know who is watching their shows. Understanding an audience is vital for a show to flourish because, in order for viewership to remain high, viewers need to want to watch a show. Knowing which locations are interested in a specific show is helpful so that the producers and creators know where it would be beneficial to advertise. Also, as viewers tend to be more interested in a show if it takes place in their state, it could be a good strategy for producers and creators to base their show in a location where they want to target a specific kind of viewer.
For politicians and news outlets, knowing who is watching is also important. Demographic information, such as political leanings, allows politicians and news outlets to target a given location of people who they know are going to listen and give the politician and news outlet credibility. In addition, a politician or news company could choose an area they know does not lean the same way politically and work on changing the political beliefs and opinions of the area.
For the general population, having access to this information may not be important for their job such as those previously mentioned, but as a good consumer, it is important to understand what exactly it is that they are consuming. The people in the industry know their intentions when they decide to film a show with a certain cast or in a certain location. It may not cross the mind of the everyday viewer that the reason they like a show so much is because it takes place in New York City, their hometown. Or that they like a certain show because it closely aligns with the political ideals they have. This information is also relevant to the general population because it’s interesting. People can learn a few things about television consumption they didn’t know before.
Methodology:
For our research, we broke it up into three parts. Lindsey focused on the broadcast and cable top shows and made graphics based on those. Maggie focused on the political aspect and made graphics based on those. Liz focused on the news sources and made graphics based on those.
Our data collection: We were given all data about the top 20 shows from an analyst at Warner Brothers. The data was separated by cable television shows and broadcast television shows. We used data from September 2016-2017, so the rest of the data we used was from the same time period. We also used Google Trends to search each TV show’s name to see the interest of each state for each of the top shows. We made sure the search was based on September 2016-2017 so the data is comparable to the rest of our data. We used the same method on Google Trends to search the most popular news sources. Utilizing IMDB, we filled in information about each show including genre, length, the gender of the lead and where the show takes place. Below our datasets are downloadable.