NBC's Olympic Ratings: Gold

111 million tuned in for big game: Nielsen

(AP) - For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl has set a new record for American television viewing. The Nielsen Co. said today that an estimated 111 million people watched the Green Bay Packers outlast the Pittsburgh Steelers in football's ultimate game. That tops the 106.5 million who watched the 2010 game between New Orleans and Indianapolis, and pushes the series finale of M-A-S-H, which had held the title of the most-watched TV show in the United States for 27 years, to No. 3. "We're excited about the fan reaction," said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell today. More»

Face it, O'Brien's ratings weren't great

(NEWSER) - Conan O’Brien joins the ranks of the unemployed today, so the ousted Tonight Show host now has plenty of time to track the backlash and second-guessing about the TV shell game. Jay Leno remains the villain of the piece, but the hard truth is that O’Brien never drew the numbers of young viewers to his time slot that NBC had hoped for. “The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” a strategist told the New York Times. More»

Nation of jobless tunes in to watch him jab at NBC execs

(AP) - Conan O'Brien is about to be out of a job, and his bitter cracks on NBC execs are doing what his show did not—viewership has soared. O'Brien's ratings have been rising through the week, and Tonight ratings Friday were 50% higher than they've been this season. O'Brien beat out Letterman, according to a preliminary Nielsen estimate, and in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC relies on to set advertising prices, O'Brien even beat Leno's primetime show. More»

Real prime-time shows beat talk show every night

(NEWSER) - Here’s one headline Jay Leno won’t want to read. Ever since the fall TV season began in earnest Sept. 21, the former king of late night has been getting his keister kicked in primetime. He’s finished in last place every single night, with his numbers falling steadily and hitting a new low of 4.5 million viewers on Monday. Over those first two weeks, he represents a 25% dropoff from NBC’s 10pm offerings last year. More»

(NEWSER) - A group of media companies has joined forces with major advertisers to challenge Nielsen's dominance in TV ratings measurement, the Financial Times reports. The firms involved—including NBC, Time Warner, Disney, and Procter & Gamble—aim to have their rival audience measurement scheme up and running by next month, a move that could potentially shake up the way in which the $70 billion spent on TV ads yearly is parceled out. More»