TVloop Blog

Hitwise recently announced their top ten list of network TV show websites and it’s dominated at the top by reality shows. Below is the chart courtesy of MarketingCharts.com.

The above chart measures the market share in terms of visits for network TV shows for the week ending 1/10/09.  It’s interesting to see the dominance of reality shows as we’ve always been surprised that our users have not embraced that genre more in the TVLoop community.  In fact, the only reality show from the list that we’ve had enough interest for to create a community is American Idol which has ~44K total members across all platforms.  However, that community did show an increase of 1,751 users last week, a 4% increase and good for the #15 spot on the TVLoop Movers and Shakers list.  Conversely, of the five scripted shows on the Hitwise list, four were also on the Movers and Shakers list: Lost, 24, House, and The Office.  And with the highly anticipated premiere of Lost coming next week, we fully expect that community to move up in the weekly rankings in terms of new users.

So the obvious question is why reality shows have not performed as well within the TVLoop community despite their continued popularity on broadcast TV.  I think there are three primary reasons:

1. TVLoop communities are a way for users to express their fandom and they don’t always want to admit to watching reality shows.

2. TVLoop communities are used for a variety of activities, but discussion forums and posts are very popular.  Scripted shows lend themselves to that sort of activity while reality shows do not.

3. TVLoop communities grow virally through friend invitations.  Since reality shows don’t appeal to everyone, friends are less likely to invite their friends to the Survivor community than they are to the Lost community.

We’ll continue to track how TVLoop community data matches up against Hitwise and other stat providers over the course of the second half of this TV season.