Methodology update: Pertaining to the trendlines in the line charts, I have changed how the data point for the first quarter-hour is calculated. It’s now aggregated as a median instead of an average. The time window is the same: the trailing 90 days.
I made this change because Collision’s trendline was being skewed high due to the December 21 episode that started with 1,264,000 viewers thanks to the College Football Playoff lead-in. That first quarter-hour instance is so much greater than the norm that it was skewing the trendline significantly higher than it would be otherwise, giving a false impression about the typical starting point for Collision. Calculating the first trendline data point as a median instead of an average mitigates this problem. To be consistent , and because other programs could be subject to a similar anomaly, I changed the calculation for all programs going forward (including Smackdown here which I prepared at the same time as the latest Collision quarter-hour report). The difference is minor for programs’ latest trendlines other than Collision.
To be clear, the trendline for the first quarter-hour continues to be calculated differently than the rest of the quarter-hours, which has already been the case. The subsequent data points are calculated based on the average quarter-to-quarter change looking back the prior 90 days’ non-preemption episodes. Because we don’t know what the viewership was for the quarter-hour before the first quarter-hour of the given program, we use a different calculation, deriving the “typical” starting point. Have your eyes glazed over yet?
To be extra clear just in case: This has nothing to do with the quarter-hour viewership data itself, which comes from Nielsen via sources. This note pertains only to our dashed trendlines that appear on the line charts. This also doesn’t affect anything that appears in the table images. Wrestlenomics calculates the dashed trendlines in the line charts to give readers an idea of what’s normal for the given quarter-hour data point.
Jason Ounpraseuth contributed to this report by producing content labels.
Viewership data according to a Nielsen source.
If you rely on this report in any subsequent reports or social media posts, please credit Wrestlenomics. Please don’t re-publish the chart images themselves.
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Brandon Thurston
brandon@wrestlenomics.com
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.