Viacom Working to Address Drop in Nickelodeon Ratings
Viacom executives are continuing to work to reverse the sharp drop in Nielsen ratings for its Nickelodeon network last year, they said Thursday during the company’s earnings call. The company has characterized the drop in ratings as an anomaly and a factor of the changing makeup of the sample of Nielsen TV households. Overall for the quarter, Viacom’s ratings were down about 3 percent from a year earlier, but they would have been up a few percentage points factoring out the Nickelodeon ratings issue, said CEO Philippe Dauman.
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Viacom is taking steps to turn the ratings slide around, even though it says it has independent set-top box ratings data that show the drop in Nickelodeon viewership isn’t as dramatic as Nielsen’s figures suggest. “The pretty extensive set-top box data we have in no way reflect what we're seeing from the Nielsen measurements,” Dauman said. “That being said, that’s the environment we're operating in and we're going to attack it as we always do, which is to go after our audience.” He said the network has more new episodes of its hit shows and new shows on tap for 2012 than it did for 2011. New programming typically draws larger audiences, he said: “We'll go after our new Nielsen sample and I'm confident that as the year progresses that you'll see progress in Nickelodeon’s ratings."
Viacom doesn’t attribute the drop in Nickelodeon’s Nielsen ratings to more availability of its shows online through Netflix, Dauman said. “We look at that very closely and we don’t think the availability of the limited amount of Nickelodeon library content we have on Netflix has a significant impact on ratings,” he said. Netflix still has only a small fraction of total TV households as subscribers, he said. And the drop in Nielsen ratings for Nickelodeon’s linear network hasn’t corresponded to a rise in viewing of its older shows on Netflix, he said. “The number of Nickelodeon content streams were pretty much the same between the summer and fall,” he said.
Dauman said he expects high demand from advertisers when Viacom begins to sell Nickelodeon spots in the up-front ad buying season this year. “Nickelodeon has an overwhelming share of the kids market,” he said. “Given that the second-positioned kids’ network does not sell advertising, we enter the up-front in a position of strength."
Meanwhile, Viacom will announce an agreement to distribute some of its programming to a new online video distributor next week, Dauman said: “A new online partner will announce a deal we just signed that involves a wide selection of our library content."
Sales at Viacom for the three months ended Dec. 31 gained 3 percent from a year earlier to $3.95 billion, the company said. Operating income fell 2 percent to $1.01 billion, while net income from continuing operations fell 5 percent to $591 million.