The Charts: General Sentiment Bows Out of the TV Social Network Tracking Business

For most of this season, the General Sentiment social analytics company has been reporting the Top 25 broadcast network and cable channel shows based on the social network activity relating to the live broadcast of an episode.  But I just learned this week that they will no longer be tracking those stats which means that Brother Nielsen once again has a monopoly on the TV measuring business.  And it’s a shame because the information that General Sentiment provided was quite useful and I found the company very good to work with.  They did an excellent job over the time that they were reporting those numbers and we could see how crucial the social net activity is because the CW entries, which typically have low viewership numbers, often scored well in those listings.  And we also saw that the sci fi / fantasy genre in general (across all the channels) tended to be well represented on the social networks.  Those are important stats because it demonstrates an engaged audience watching at the time of broadcast that is not typically represented by the Nielsens viewing ratings.  And the sampling that the Nielsens have used has been faulted for a long time, with the social network rankings definitely showing what that old school company is missing out on.  We saw very similar stats the prior year when Get Glue (later TV Tag and now gone) was doing its own tracking of the social networks.  They unfortunately bowed out and now we have lost General Sentiment as well.  We still have the Nielsen Twitter Ratings, but they only release the Top 10 for the week and the Top 5 for each day (and if you miss the rankings, they’re gone).  We don’t see too much in the way of genre shows in that narrow slice, but I’m sure if they expanded to at least the Top 25 that we would see much more.  But it is what is and I thank General Sentiment for the very helpful numbers that they published during the season and also the very good people that work for that company.  I will continue to watch for new sources tracking social network activity, but for now we will have to settle with the Nielsen Twitter Ratings.

As for this week’s charts (all from Brother Nielsen whom we must now bow to), Agents of SHIELD managed to continue and cling the Top 25 based on the ratings in the 18-49 demographic and Gotham made its first appearance since before it went on a month-long repeat break in March.  Apart from that, we see most of the usual suspects on the charts based on the Nielsen data.

Here is the full look at chart activity for genre shows for the week of April 20th thru 26th:

Nielsen Twitter Ratings ranked based on the Unique Audience – The total number of distinct Twitter accounts accruing at least one impression of one or more different Tweets ascribed to a TV episode.  More info at this link.