Saturday, August 24, 2013

The Huge, GOP-Leaning Audience for ‘Duck Dynasty’

Reid Wilson shares a map from National Media, a Republican ad-buying firm, depicting a recent television event: “Using data from Rentrak, a company that monitors data from set-top boxes, the map shows what percentage of television viewers in specific designated market areas watched this television event live.” It’s worth clicking over and reading.
Unsurprisingly, red or Republican-leaning counties, particularly rural and Southern, watched the season premiere of Duck Dynasty while Democratic-leaning counties generally tuned it out. Huge viewership in Louisiana, lowest viewership in New York, San Francisco, and Miami.
What’s more, you could argue that the red-state audience is what’s keeping television afloat these days.
That premiere episode of Duck Dynasty set a new record for audience size for basic-cable “nonfiction series” — read, reality shows — with 11.8 million. In broadcast television, the top show last week was CBS’s Under the Dome, with . . . 10.3 million. (Yes, most network shows are in reruns right now, while theDuck Dynasty episode was new.)

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