Why CNN?

Why run a half hour of America Held Hostage, whoops, Shutdown Showdown at 11:00pm? And if you’re going to do it, why not actually promote it on your web site and on social media? No @userid.  No #hashtag.  Come on, how hard is it to put #CNNShutDown on the chyron?  Do you just not care?

Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to wait them out.  Maybe the thinking is that a program so poorly promoted will encourage a speedy resolution of the budget crisis so members of Congress can get back to watching re-runs of Erin?  Not sure about this at all… I’ll just leave the jumble of programs in at 11pm until stuff gets resolved — either in Washington or Atlanta.

Meanwhile, The Kelly File seems to be settling in at a lower level of Twitter activity, even while her ratings (through Wednesday) seem to be bouncing around a bit.  The Rachel Maddow Show is handily out ranking Kelly in Twitter engagement except for the Monday launch of the show. But I think that what we saw on Monday was people talking about the show, not to it.  There’s still no correlation between how the volume of tweets has been declining and how the Nielsens have been behaving, but lets give it a bit more time to see…

Otherwise, the winners of the day were the usual.  The Ed Show, which works social media hard, had the best mentions during a show, Piers Morgan the most during the day, and MSNBC got the most mentions overall while CNN’s mentions had the furtherest reach. If everyone who tweeted about MSNBC followed each other, MSNBC would be tops…

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E! News popped up on the radar and won the day overall while Sean Hannity won the best hour on Wednesday.  CNN held up with the largest reach, which means, more or less, that its viewers are more influential on Twitter than those of the other networks.

Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File brought in strong Nielsen viewer ratings on Tuesday, even though its Twitter ratings dropped; on Wednesday its Twitter ratings continued their slump.  Is her audience just not into Twitter? Or is there a waning of enthusiasm that only Twitter is seeing so far?  Time will tell…  but if the ratings start to dive you heard it here first. Shep Smith’s Fox News Deck seems to not be generating a lot of traffic in its launch week, perhaps because people are too busy trying to see if the giant iPads in the background are looking at anything more interesting than Shep’s talking about.

Also, the 11pm hour is now a mess with CNN running Shutdown Showdown.  Is it it’s own show? Is it just another half hour of Erin?  I’m going to have to watch it to find out; the CNN website is almost vacant on the topic.

Sometimes I wonder if the networks even pay attention to their websites; for example, on Fox News’ site, if you click on Shepard Smith’s new show it just takes you to the Fox News home page.  Fox isn’t alone in this kind of behavior, but it’s just amazing that for a new show they hide the page from the public.  I guess they’ll get around to fixing it eventually.

Friday is the launch of Up Late with Alec (Baldwin) on MSBNC, up against Bill Maher on HBO.  Just given HBO’s pay status we know who will win, but it will be interesting to see if there’s any dent in Real Time.  Perhaps there won’t be, given that HBO subscribers generally have the ability to view it at a later hour on demand.

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Monday, The Kelly File’s premiere dominated the Twitter ratings, scoring the most mentions during its broadcast and beating its time-slot competitor with 2247 mentions during the broadcast and 5860 mentions throughout the day.

Tuesday, however, it fell from the top slot and was even nosed out in its time-slot by The Rachel Maddow Show. As TKF fell, our normal pattern returned: MSNBC’s The Ed Show won its slot while Piers Morgan, who has international exposure to keep him a popular topic around the world, returned to the overall leader post.

In terms of networks, CNN won handily in terms of total tweets, total unique tweeters, and reach.

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(Note: An earlier version of this post was made with the previous week’s show line up, omitting FNC’s new evening line up.  That has been corrected.)

This week begins with some additional statistics behind the counts.  

First, I’m giving separate counts on the networks for number of tweets sent vs. the number of unique people who have tweeted.  You can see, for example, that Fox and MSNBC’s audience tends to send close to two tweets each, on average, while CNN’s audience sends closer to one tweet.

Second, I’m introducing a new metric called “reach”.  For each tweet that is sent, it adds up how many people follow the person tweeting it — how many timelines that tweet will show up in.  Thus, if network A has 10,000 mentions from people with an average of 10 followers, the reach will be 100,000.  On the other hand, if network B has 10,000 mentions from people with an average of 100 followers, the reach will be 1,000,000.  So network B has much greater reach:  tweets mentioning network B will potentially be seen 10 times as often as tweets about network A.  It’s a measure of “impressions”, not audience, to be clear.

In the stats for today, we see that CNN’s reach is hugely larger than the reach of MNSBC or Fox, even if CNN has much fewer tweets than those two networks.

Over the next few days I’ll be adding in calculations for the reach for individual shows.

Monday’s launch of The Kelly File won top spot in its hour, while Shepard Smith Reporting’s Fox News Deck garnered modest mentions during its tough 3pm hour, nudging past MSNBC’s The Cycle, although not when you include mentions of the four hosts’s twitter accounts as well.  Fox may have hurt itself by switching accounts for Shep from @Team_Shep to @ShepNewsTeam.

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Sunday saw MSNBC run its yearly “Education Nation” event, which was split across two shows.  The first was the Student Town All, which was led by Melissa Harris-Perry and broadcast during her show.  The second was the Teacher Town Hall, which was broadcast during the 12pm and 1pm hours of the day.

Because the same “#EducationNation” hashtag was in use across both shows, the stats for “Most Mentions During Day” end up with Education Nation as the winner, even though it’s not a single show.  But in second place is The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, so there is little distortion caused by #EducationNation.

Interestingly enough, the surge in mentions caused by Education Nation were not enough to boost MSNBC into first place for mentions; CNN won that by a nose.

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