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If you are looking for information on how the Nielsen ratings work, why they matter, and why age demographics matter, please see the information available in Numbers 101 and Numbers 102.

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Our Data

We publish a lot of content, some of it regularly. Our most popular items are listed in the top navigation of the site, but here's (hopefully!) a helpful guide to some of our content. We generally have only two types of regularly produced data: daily, and weekly.

DAILY RATINGS/VIEWING DATA

Overnight Fast Affiliate Broadcast Ratings:

This is typically published daily around 9:30am pacific time and is based on preliminary fast national overnight reporting from Nielsen.  This is only for the national broadcast networks, and does not include any data for cable shows.

Final Broadcast Ratings:

This is typically published daily around 1:30pm pacific time and is the final adjusted ratings for the night.

Final Cable Ratings:

We post the top 100 cable shows for adults 25-54 for Sunday-Friday, generally the day after airdate, but Friday's are posted on Monday and Sunday's are posted on Tuesday.

Cable News Ratings:

Data is published every day, Monday through Friday generally around 3pm pacific.  While we ultimately get the data for the weekend viewing, we do not actually receive any data over the weekends, so Friday's numbers generally are posted Monday afternoon.  The weekend numbers are usually posted Tuesday morning.

WEEKLY DATA

Renew/Cancel Index

Far and away the most popular of the weekly data.  These reports are typically updated with the previous week's data and posted for all networks by Tuesday evenings.     Separate reports for scripted shows are available by network, and there is an overarching post containing all the unscripted shows with links to the various network posts.

Live+7 Day DVR Ratings

Most of our daily and weekly postings only include any DVR viewing that happened the same night the show was aired (Live+SD or live plus same day DVR viewing) , but Nielsen also measures to include a week's worth of DVR viewing (Live+7 or live plus seven days of DVR viewing).  We post these weekly, usually on Monday or Tuesday afternoons, but this data takes a while to compile and be released by Nielsen, so the data that we published for example on March 30, 2009 was for the week of March 9-15, 2009.

Weekly Prime-time Broadcast Top 25

Ranking of the top twenty shows for the week based on overall viewing the advertising-centric adults 18-49 viewing for the previous week.  This is usually published Tuesday afternoons.

Weekly Cable Top 25

Ranks the top cable shows for the week based on total viewing.    While the broadcast rankings only measure prime-time, the cable rankings include all day parts, and you regularly see just how popular SpongeBob is!

Weekly Broadcast Network Prime-time rankings

Produced weekly, usually on Tuesdays, these reports rank the overall weekly primetime averages by network by total viewership and adults 18-49 ratings for the five six biggest broadcast networks, including Spanish language Univision.

Weekly Cable Network TV Rankings

Produced weekly, usually on Tuesdays, the weekly cable network rankings rank the advertising supported basic cable networks by average primetime and total day audiences as well as primetime adults 18-49.    Premium cable is not included in these rankings.

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We post a lot of other stuff regularly too, including season-to-date network rankings, and soap opera ratings, so hopefully if you didn't find what you were looking for above, you can find it in the table below.

Tonight in Prime Time