ABC Tops Nielsen Ratings … for Web Sites

ABC.com gets the most traffic from viewers looking to catch up on broadcast TV shows they have missed.

According to a Nielsen Media Research survey of 1,500 adults, 50% of the total said they go to ABC.com. Next was NBC.com at 41%, followed by CBS.com at 37%, FOX.com at 24% and YouTube rounding out the top five at 17%.

Writers striking over how much they will be paid for multiplatform uses of their content: Take note. The study found, not surprisingly, that younger viewers (the 18-34 demo) are two-and-a-half times more likely to take an aggressive, new-tech approach on catching up on TV shows, with 56% saying they use digital-video recorders, the Internet, or MP3 players to view the shows, compared with only 21% for viewers 55-plus.

One-quarter of the respondents said they had watched an entire episode of a TV show online in the past three months. For 18-34s, that number was 39%, while it was only 11% for those 55-plus.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.