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Two million viewers watched the Oscars through DVR

Indiantelevision.com Team

(6 March 2008 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: US media research company Nielsen has released an analysis of viewing and ad trends from the 80th Academy Awards.

Of the 32 million total viewers, two million people chose to watch the Oscars later the same evening via digital video recorders. The 32 million figure is a big drop from the 40 million that tuned in last year and is the lowest for the past
several years.

People in upper to upper-middle income brackets are almost twice as likely to watch the Oscars telecast, according to Claritas, Nielsen’s marketing research unit. Of this group, a majority are women at least 35 years old, college educated.

White viewers accounted for 86 per cent of the 32 million people who tuned in for the show, while Hispanic and African-American viewers each accounted for approximately seven per cent of the total audience.

JC Penney’s American Living Home Furnishings ad was the highest-rated commercial minute of the show. In all, 43 ads aired during ABC’s broadcast this year, with L’Oreal and Coca-Cola tied as the top advertisers. The highest ratings for the show were in New York and the lowest were in Houston.
After the Academy Awards, fans flocked online to check
out celebrities’ red carpet fashions and review who had won Hollywood’s biggest prizes.

According to Nielsen Online, traffic to Yahoo!’s Oscars web site, oscars.movies.yahoo.com, increased 201 per cent the day after the telecast, from 751,000 unique visitors on the day of the Oscars to 2.3 million unique visitors on the following day, 25 February.

Overall, however, web traffic to Oscar-related sites on the day after the event declined collectively by 26 per cent this year - from 3.3 million unique visitors on post-Oscars Monday in 2007 to 2.4 million unique visitors on the same day in 2008. Nielsen Online monitored content on approximately 70 million blogs before, during, and after the Academy Awards. The graph below shows the percentage of these blogs that mentioned the Academy Awards during the past two months.

Immediately following the Academy Awards telecast, online conversations about the event shot up 500 per cent above the last spike in Oscars-related blogging that occurred on 22 January, when the award nominations were announced. Blog discussions following the awards telecast focused on post-show reactions, including thoughts on the night’s winners and losers, as well as host Jon Stewart’s performance.