With NBC still trying to untangle its late-night mess, a study emerged Wednesday illustrating just how damaging Jay Leno‘s prime-time show was to its local stations.
The research firm Harmelin Media said local NBC stations saw their late news audience drop by an average of 25% in November compared with the previous year among 25- to 54-year-old viewers–the key target demographic for advertisers.
The decline was particularly steep in some of the largest markets: 48% in New York, 43% in Los Angeles and 47% in Philadelphia.
NBC cited concerns among its 210 local stations in ditching the weeknight experiment of The Jay Leno Show at 10 p.m. The network wants to move Leno back to 11:35 for a half-hour show and shift Conan O’Brien‘s Tonight show to after midnight, but O’Brien said Tuesday he doesn’t want to move. A negotiated exit by O’Brien is probable; NBC still hasn’t commented on their host’s declaration.
The local stations blame Leno for their news ratings going down because he provided a lousy lead-in.
Plenty of factors can go into a ratings decline. But Bernie Shimkus, Harmelin’s vice-president of research, said the decline coincided with the launch of Leno’s show last fall. He said he was surprised that the declines were so uniform across the country.
"We all knew it was going to go down,” Shimkus said. "But I don’t think anyone forecast anything in the neighbourhood of 40 to 50%.”
Harmelin used data on the number of ads run in late local news programs and their cost to calculate that over a three-month period, the Leno experiment would cost these stations collectively $22 million. The 10 stations that NBC owns and operates would lose something like $570,000 per week, the report said.
