Why do I do this. It never works.

People still start comparing numbers they don't have context for and it's just the worst.

Why are you comparing ABC and the CW? That's meaningless. Why. Why this.

The CW is not doing badly, they are a well oiled profit machine.

They have fucking streamlined their productions. Crew, extras, sets, everything rotated from show to show as they film year round. They've mastered the genre show.

Their social media marketing is unmatched. God bless Shatner for adopting these scifi kids. They are truly the heirs of the Star Trek spirit.

You could watch shiny slick Star Trek movies, or you could watch these shows full of earnest young actors going all out with their goofy scripts and limited budgets.

Young and Sexy™ weirdos forever

That's a really good explanation!!! I never really had a good reason for why CW did things the way they did, I just assumed that there was more than just the ratings they were taking into consideration

but you lay it out very clearly!!!

I also appreciated ur explanation!

I'm glad it made sense! Unfortunately everyone I know who works in television have their twitters locked down so I can't link to their essays about it.

TV is a weird, weird industry. Movies are much more straight forward with their budget/box office ratios. TV is all secret handshakes over shooting scripts.

I also feel so pretentious when I go, "Oh, I know someone who works in Hollywood" but it's not that special. No one loves pirating and shit talking like tv employees.

Though it should be noted that CW isn't the only channel moving away from pure commercial sales. They're just implementing it faster.

DVRs have fucked up commercials like crazy. People records shit and just watches it with fast forwarding on the weekend.

You have to come up with a different reason to get people to watch live. Sports and reality tv competitions shows are propping up so many channels.

yeah even sports I usually watch dvr'd now because commercials are so annoying & excessive

the last thing I actually regularly watched live was breaking bad, b/c if I didn't watch it live I might get spoiled haha

other shows I might get spoiled too but I just don't care enough to sit thru commercials

The shocking twists in dramas in the last ten minutes is a big thing to force people to watch live as well. Especially hashtag campaigns along with them.

Twitter's a total game changer. Empire's numbers were built on livetweeting.

yeah, I had to unfollow baseball twitters and block twitter trends with a css script so I won't get spoiled for tigers games haha

I never get spoiled for the TdF b/c none of my friends follow it and I have cyclists I follow on a separate list

but certain tv shows yeah it's like, either don't go on any social media until you watch it, or watch live

There's been a real shift on days that ads air as well in response to DVR. Especially for movies!

The revenue split between studios and theaters changes according to how long the film has been out: www.quora.com/What-perce...

Studios get 80% opening weekend, so they want everyone to see it then, obviously.

So it used to be the big nights for movie ads were Wednesday and Thursday

But with DVR time delay they have to put the ads earlier in the week to reach people for the weekend.

This panel goes into it more: Nerdist Writers Panel #155: Ratings, Recaps, Reviews Panel from A...

TV: Super fucking weird

It's kind of interesting though to watch stuff on Monday and spot with shows are heavily dvr'd because they have more movie ads.