Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2010 > January > 14 > Entry
The ‘Leno effect’ in Austin
You may have seen the Associated Press story elsewhere on our site about the latest in the NBC late night debacle: Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno have increasingly turned their ire away from the network and toward each other.
Further into the story were these alarming statistics:
The research firm Harmelin Media said local NBC stations saw their late news audience drop by an average of 25 percent in November compared with the previous year among 25- to 54-year-old viewers. That’s the demographic upon which news advertising rates are based. The decline was particularly steep in some of the largest markets: 48 percent in New York, 43 percent in Los Angeles and 47 percent in Philadelphia. Harmelin used data on the number of ads run in late local news programs and their cost to calculate that over a three-month period, the Leno experiment would cost these stations collectively $22 million. The 10 stations that NBC owns and operates would lose something like $570,000 per week, the report said.
I contacted Bernie Shimkus, Harmelin’s Vice President of Research, to get specific numbers for Austin.
He responded that KXAN, Austin’s NBC affiliate, experienced a 30.8% ratings drop in their late newscast according to Nielsen Media Research data (that’s a bigger drop here than in more than half of the top 20 U.S. television markets). Harmelin estimated that would translate to an estimated $7,895 per week loss in late news advertising revenue for KXAN.
These late news losses don’t take into account the additional revenues declines the affiliates suffered in directly in Prime time and in Late Night as a ripple effect of the move, Harmelin’s press release noted. According to Shimkus, “Even if The Jay Leno Show was itself profitable from a production standpoint as NBC executives continued to assert to the end, the overall revenue picture for the company was not moving in a positive direction.”
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