Whether it was the genius digital campaigns, or the fact that the AMC show can be watched in addicting spoonfuls on Netflix, Walter White took over the Internet on Sunday. Oh yeah, and that TV thing too.
At least by the standards of cable TV, AMC says that 5.9 million people watched Sunday’s show, which kicked off the last season of the excellent “cancer-ridden-science-teacher-becomes-meth-kingpin series” (here’s a great article from BuzzFeed that captures his worst moments). That’s up double from the first episode of last summer’s season.
But it’s the leap in online conversation about Breaking Bad that has marketers and users talking. Social TV chatter tracker Trendrr counted 1.18 million interactions about the show over the weekend on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. That’s way, way up from the 268,000 Likes, comments, etc., that Trendrr saw last year.
But the relationshsip between the 140 charatcer site and TV ratings is still shady, AllThingsD’s Peter Kafta tells us more about the TV/Twitter correlation, “While Nielsen now says it has evidence that Twitter chatter can boost ratings for some shows, sometimes, it’s probably just as likely that last night’s ratings reflect other factors. Like weeks of publicity, as well as the series’ performance on Netflix, where the previous episodes are popular binge fare.”
*Note that Nielsen’s SocialGuide counted 760,000 Tweets from 400,000 users for the same show. Given that Facebook has a much larger audience of TV chatterers than Twitter does, it’s hard to reconcile Trendrr’s numbers with Nielsen/SocialGuide’s, but that’s the nature of the social TV beast.
What do you think the relationship between Twitter and TV is Can it boost viewership, or is it just a venue for frenzied fans
Source: AllThingsD
