Reports: Fandom

The scripted drama boom and the rise of streaming have dramatically reshaped TV consumption and viewing habits. The act of watching a TV show is no longer confined within the four walls of the living room, nor is it constricted by a fixed schedule. Measuring the success of a show can no longer be done by traditional ratings alone, but instead a wider range of metrics, including brand awareness, TV viewership, streaming and fandom, have all become critical in judging the success of a show in the streaming era.

TV fandom underpins viewing across all platforms and territories, but is being reshaped by streaming, with audiences having much greater control over what they watch. This choice-led viewing provides the foundations for deeper degrees of audience fandom, but also the diminishment of more passive audience elements.

In the distributed digital landscape audience overlaps are sometimes unexpected and nuanced; the competition for attention goes beyond the simple binary choices of one TV show or another – i.e. video subscribers can be gamers too. The battleground is about time spent with content – of a broader type, including games.

This is part of MIDiA’s data snapshot series in which we spotlight curated consumer datasets. Figure 1: Streaming Giants Have the Biggest Brand Fan Audiences Brand Fan Penetration for Leading Technology and Consumer Electronics Brands, Q1 2018 Differentiated brand propositions are increasingly required in a technology and media landscape flooded with parity-led content and few, if any, distinctions on price.

As the TV viewing experience becomes increasingly fragmented across the digital sphere, TV show fandom is becoming ever more nuanced. Across the five largest social apps by weekly usage, TV brand engagement varies considerably. Facebook and YouTube are both mainstream social apps by engagement and exhibit the highest levels of TV fandom among SVOD subscribers.

In our July report, TV Show Fandom: Measuring TV Shows’ Real Appeal , we introduced MIDiA’s quarterly Paid Content Brand Tracker by revealing a sneak peek of the data we track for more than 50 TV shows in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. In this report, we provide analysis of some of the top-level trends for the Q2 2017 edition of the MIDiA Brand Tracker.

The TV industry is in a measurement crisis. Ever more, viewing is shifting from the linear schedule and leading streaming services are heavily guarded about their data, creating a measurement blind spot. Social behaviour and piracy activity provide an additional source of information, but not an alternative.

The live music industry has always had a slightly incongruous relationship with its recorded music industry cousin. Often having to tolerate the record labels’ business being called ‘the music industry’ and equally often, finding itself at the focus of consumer discontent over ticketing practices.

There is a growing disconnect between fan engagement and fan monetisation. Facebook and YouTube took artist-fan engagement to the masses, but music spending is still falling. Aficionados, the super fans that drive most revenue, are both being taken for granted and reducing their spend, trading down from multiple albums a month to 9.