Study is shocked to find that fewer people watch reruns

In the television world, where total viewership for live watching is dwindling and spiraling down faster than you can touch that dial, fewer people are actually tuning in for reruns — if you can believe it!

At least that’s what Santa Monica-based ad agency RPA found in a study it conducted recently, before presumably shrieking in horror at the very shocking news. Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating their reaction to the study (by a lot); the agency found that during the 2011-2012 season, audiences for rerun episodes (that is, non-original installments of series that air) declined by 4% from the previous year. All in all, only an average of about 48% of the original air’s audience shows up for the repeat airing.

“There are more places to watch reruns,” RPA’s analyst David Scardino rationalized, somehow forgetting the fact that there are also more networks with more original content while broadcast networks insist on having inane and badly scheduled reruns during a season.

Seriously, for example ABC’s Revenge went two weeks without a new episode, then aired an original, and then went off the air for another three weeks. In what world does this make sense?

Well, anyway, just in case you were wondering: you’re probably not watching reruns according to “science” and “statistics” because you’re most likely watching old The Big Bang Theory episodes on TBS rather than CBS.

Source: LA Times