According to AdAge citing Nielsen, broadcast C3 ratings in the fourth quarter dropped 11 percent versus the year-ago period, as ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox combined for an average primetime draw of just 7.02 million adults age 18-49, down from the 7.86 million members of the demo who watched the ads during the three terminal months of 2017. Comparisons to the fourth quarter of 2016 are even more off-putting, as the Big Four nets over the last two years have seen more than one-quarter (27 percent) of their demographically desirable viewers vanish into thin air.
When expressed as a decimal rating, the combined demo delivery at the four networks works out to a 5.4, which translates to a year-over-year loss of around 845,000 18-49-year-olds per night versus the earlier 6.1 rating. Over a two-year span, some 2.6 million members of the demo have dematerialized, a number which reflects the loss of more than two whole ratings points (2.1).For the uninitiated, the C3 currency blends a very rough estimate of average commercial ratings with three days of time-shifted viewing; as such, it offers networks, buyers and advertisers the best approximation of actual ad deliveries. Along with its more recently adopted counterpart, the extended-dance-remix that is C7, C3 is the standard against which nearly all TV ad deals are priced and guaranteed. That the additional three-to-seven days of playback data don't materially help the networks claw back a whole lot of lost ratings points—the average gain from the vanilla live-same-day data to C3 is still just two-tenths of a ratings point, for a net add of just 258,000 demographically apposite viewers per show—has everything to do with the fact that people rarely watch commercials when they have the means with which to do away with them.
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