Rentrak Study Tracks Viewer Loyalty

Rentrak Corp., which provides multi-screen media measurements for the advertising, television and entertainment industries, today announced results from the first report in its Factfinder series of specialty studies that examined viewer loyalty for the ABC and Fox networks.

Using Rentrak’s TV Essentials service, Chief Research Officer Bruce Goerlich analyzed viewing data from the final season of Lost (ABC, Mondays, 9-10 p.m.) and 24 (Fox, Tuesdays, 9-10 p.m.) to determine if viewers would continue to remain loyal to the networks they previously watched with these two shows gone from the broadcast primetime schedules, or if they would experiment with other network programming during the same time period.

In analyzing the results, Rentrak found that regular viewers of Lost and 24 were more likely than the average viewing households to watch ABC and Fox programming; proving that despite a multitude of consumer viewing options, there is still viewer loyalty to networks.

Harnessing the power of its TV Essentials television database system, Rentrak created a “Lost Viewer Index” and a “24 Viewer Index.” The indices compare how loyal Lost and 24 viewers from last season are viewing TV today and compares that to television viewing of the total population. For example, in the chart below, a 173 Index for Dancing with the Stars means that historically loyal viewers of Lost were 73% more likely to watch the show than the general population.

Through the first two weeks of the new fall broadcast season, both Lost and 24 viewers remained loyal to ABC and Fox on Tuesday nights between 9 and 10 p.m. Rentrak also reviewed Monday through Friday 9-10 p.m. viewing and found that Lost viewers once again remained loyal to the ABC network.

Viewers of 24 showed more diversity in viewing throughout the week (Monday-Friday, between 9 and 10 p.m.) with CBS programs attracting the highest ratio of former 24 viewers.

“Viewer segment targets can be defined based on any combination of series or network viewers and allow for better promotion and counter programming to maintain or attract new viewers,” said Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak chief research officer. “By utilizing a massive database of stable television viewing behavior, Rentrak is able to provide new levels of insight to leverage viewing behavior patterns.”