from Amazon
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Won’t someone think of the Eastern seaboard kids?
...the later a game starts and finishes, the larger the audience across all demographics except adults ages 55 and above, who start to tune out after 9 p.m. ET. Additionally, the youngest demographic, 6- to 17-year-olds, surprisingly make up the same proportion of viewers at 8 p.m. as they do at midnight (see charts, pages 38-39), and like their older counterparts, they watch evening postseason games more than comparable contests in the day.
Hard to believe the numbers. However, if you look at the data in the article, it looks like those are the national numbers. Having a kid in California at 12 PM ET (i.e., 9 PM local) doesn’t really answer the question. This is one of those “lies, damned lies, and statistics” ways of trying to make your point. And clearly, this has to be done based on the local time. The parents of the California kid is not going to decide to go to bed, depending on whether it’s sundown in NYC. It cam very well be that the reason the ratings are so high at 11PM ET, is that in the rest of the country, it’s 8PM, 9PM and 10PM.