Where’s the community for The Big Bang Theory?
10 Feb
Posted by: Bryan Bennett in: Stats, TV Networks
According to James Hibberd’s Live Feed blog, The Big Bang Theory helped CBS to a win on Monday night with 12.7 million viewers. That’s also the highest viewer number ever posted by the two year old comedy.
While it’s largely helped by following Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory is starting to come into its own by carrying its own core audience. A great post over at TV Squad is a good indication as to why as the show is constantly throwing out fresh ideas in an effort to take the show in a different comedic direction than you would think.
Personally, I’m a recent convert to the growing fans of the show. I didn’t pay much attention to it last year, but recently I can’t get enough. Sheldon is rapidly becoming one of my favorite characters right up there with Dwight Schrute. So a big question I had when checking the TVLoop community is: Where are the rest of the Big Bang fans?
There are currently just over 25K total fans in the Addicted to The Big Bang Theory application, up from 13K at the beginning of the Fall TV season for a growth rate of about 90%. While those numbers are pretty good, the show never appears in the Top 20 Movers and Shakers list of fastest growing communities, and has under 7K monthly active users. While that’s an increase of 40%, it’s still pretty low compared to some of the larger applications. And finally, according to Media Week, Big Bang is #44 with regards to online buzz.
So what’s the story with Big Bang fans? Are they just slow to the online party, or are they primarily males who are a little less likely to embrace the TVLoop communities - TVLoop apps are ~65% female. As the show continue to grow in popularity and ratings, it should be interesting to see if it drives more fans and online buzz.
What an exciting research you do! I hope that it would reach more people in the future; I’m sure it will be very interesting to see its results as it becomes more reflective of what people particularly like in the media.
As for BBT’s online community, I did find that there are considerably many fan groups in the Internet. My method was searching for one particular person, Jim Parsons. I found discussion groups, fanfictions, etc. I admit that since I don’t do research in the field of popular media, I don’t know how their level of excitement compares to the other online fan community.
I think that it is probable that the kind of people who watch BBT aren’t the type who would so demonstratively show their liking to a movie or TV show, as (apparently) is the case with Twilight fans. I suppose they would tend to be more loose; not forming more fixed clusters of fans. As someone in the IT industry, I observe that people’s loyalty or self-association tends to be more toward a particular technology, e.g., Perl v.s. Python, etc. I think the demographics of TV show viewer would be a very interesting variable to observe.
Wish you even more success in the future!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the comment Victoria. I’m guessing you’re partially right in that the BBT’s fans are less likely to join online communities for the express intent of demonstrating their fandom.