Douglas has been listing the 18-49 numbers for GSN lately along with the total viewer numbers. Just amazingly, the demo figures show that GSN skews very old, and the pre-1990 shows skew oldest of all. I might get slammed by the older-is-better bunch, but I posted a reality-check comment on the GSN schedule board...The 18-49 numbers for the weekday morning block are embarrassing, barely measurable by Nielsen's sampling techniques. This should not surprise anybody. The pre-1990 shows have always skewed very old. They're the oldest-skewing shows in an old-skewing genre.
Improv-a-Ganza's relatively younger skew is also no surprise because comedy has always skewed younger than traditional game shows. That's why GSN tried the show in the first place. Too bad, the show got so few viewers of any age that even the 18-49 numbers were low.
It's easy for posters on this board to say GSN should just ignore the demos and program more old stuff. This board doesn't have to sell advertising time or convince cable/satellite operators to carry the network. But the demos make the network a much harder sell than younger numbers would. GSN can live off old demos, but it's a harder slog.
UPDATE: Sure enough, I got bashed by the older-is-better bunch. I give up on the production-date-fetish folks. As I said on the GSN board...People are dug in on production dates, so I won't argue the subject any more. Anyhoo, prime time/total day viewership averages for the last several dates published by Douglas:
September 15 303K/211K
September 16 359K/200K
September 17 384K/218K
September 23 372K/231K
September 24 216K/158K
September 25 136K/182K
The latest weekend was obviously a disaster. Up till then the prime time averages had been holding up well, though total day was usually pretty poor. Don't know if Douglas will eventually go back and fill in the missing days.
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