Also known as the “Big Game” in the U.S., the Super Bowl is typically one of the most viewed TV moments. In fact, in 2024 Super Bowl LVIII, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, had the largest TV audience for a single-network telecast. It’s also a sports event that audiences will frequently watch together. But it’s not the only programming audiences gather for. Our research shows that Americans watch TV with other people (friends, family, even strangers at the bar) 47% of the time, on average, and alone the rest of the time.
共同收看--至少有一个人在旁边看电视--是电视体验不可或缺的一部分，也是一个简单易懂的概念，但却不容易衡量。因此，一些媒体策划人仍然使用平面共同收视系数作为将设备指标转换为单个受众的捷径。什么是共同收视系数？下面是一个例子：在下午 2 点和晚上 8 点，每个电视屏幕应该分别有 1.2 和 1.5 名观众。在当今瞬息万变、高度分散的电视市场，这已经远远不够了。
为了说明平面共同观看因素的不足，让我们来看看过去几年体育节目中的共同观看活动。
体育节目的共同收视率随时间变化很大
Figure 1 shows the co-viewing rate (the percentage of total viewing time spent co-viewing rather than viewing alone) for all TV viewers in the U.S. from September 2022 to August 2024, across all sports programming and regardless of platform (broadcast, cable and streaming). The month-to-month variations are substantial, dipping as low as 37% in August 2023 and reaching close to 50% in January and February of 2024.
The peaks correspond to tentpole sporting events, like the Super Bowl or Copa América, but marquee events taking place outside of the U.S. led to comparatively poor co-viewing rates. That doesn’t mean that the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand had poor ratings in the U.S.—quite the opposite, in fact—but it’s more difficult to gather family and friends to watch the matches when they’re broadcast in the middle of the night or in the early morning. As for March Madness, it seemed to attract more alone viewing than average, even though we can see a small bump in co-viewing associated with the record-breaking 2024 tournaments.
按人口统计学划分的主要共同观看差距
不同人口群体的共同收视率也有很大差异。图 2 显示，在同一两年时间里，西班牙裔和黑人观众在体育节目的共同收视率上相差 20 个百分点，年轻观众和年长观众相差 10 到 15 个百分点。
Household size is a factor (Hispanic viewers live in larger households), but there are cultural factors at play as well. For instance, young adults might be more willing to go out and watch sports broadcasts with groups of friends. They’re watching considerably less TV than their older counterparts, especially linear TV, but the little they’re watching, they’re doing as a group.
体育与其他节目类型相比如何？
在图 3 中，我们将视角放宽了一些，将体育节目的共同收视率与电视剧、新闻和综艺节目等其他顶级节目类型的共同收视率进行了比较。
We can see that over that same two-year time period, children’s shows consistently produced more co-viewing than sports—not surprising considering that kids, especially young kids, often have a parent around when they’re watching TV—and showed more stability over time as well. Game shows performed really well too, a good reminder of the effect that streaming has had in recent years in broadening the genre’s appeal beyond its traditional (read: older) linear TV audience. And the rest of the top programming genres stayed within a narrow co-viewing band just above the 30% mark.
对广告商和媒体所有者的主要影响
从上述见解中，您应该得出什么结论？
- First and foremost, there’s no such thing as a flat co-viewing factor. That’s clearly evident when we look at sports, but there are subtle variations for other genres as well (and more so if we start to drill down at the program level).
- If you’re an advertiser planning to target a specific demographic group or a more advanced audience, you should throw your co-viewing assumptions out the window and get your hands on co-viewing insights based on actual real-life behavior for that target group.
- If you’re a media owner, understanding whether people are watching alone or with other people can help you finetune your own shows and improve how you monetize your audiences.
准备好探索共同观看在你的世界中究竟是什么样子了吗？
In a recent blog post, we reviewed how Nielsen’s co-viewing calculations rely on robust people-based measurement solutions inside and outside the house, as well as advanced algorithms to assign viewership to individuals when the only available data comes from devices, as is typically the case with big data from set-top boxes and smart TVs.
Learn more about how and when audiences watch television, or contact us to discover how to use co-viewing to your advantage.
