GSN ratings chatter

GSN recently sent out a press release with some (selected) good ratings news. Conversation ensues on the GSN board...

Other poster: GSN has released official numbers on some of their ratings on their corporate page. The press release states that the $25,000 Pyramid hour on Saturday, honoring Dick Clark saw ratings up 32% from regular episodes that air now. On Sunday, April 22, Harvey Feud at 5:30pm received 587,000 viewers, and 5th Grader later that night at 8pm received 742,000 viewers, a 6-year network high.

Sooner or later we'll see the entire week of April 16-22 from Douglas Pucci. Frankly, the press release tells us nothing we didn't already know. Jeff Foxworthy and Steve Harvey are the stars of the network. Well, duh. And I'm not sure but I think Behind the Blank, the Match Game documentary, might have gotten the big number back in 2006. I vaguely remember a press release about it. (Well, now I'm not so sure. Behind the Blank ran on GSN less than six years ago.)

Another poster: The last two things to get over 700K+ viewers on GSN were Behind The Blank and The Tonya Harding Anything to Win.

Wrong. The first Bob Eubanks ep of GSN's Newlywed Game on January 7, 2010 got 718K viewers. That was the last published 700K+ number on the network. Baggage and Family Feud occasionally came close in subsequent published weeks. Baggage got 690K on November 17, 2010, for instance.

But a lot of weeks went unpublished since January, 2010. So there may have been later 700K+ numbers we don't know about. Maybe the most remarkable recent ratings performance was a regular episode of Wheel of Fortune which somehow pulled 672K viewers at 2:00PM in the afternoon on Black Friday, November 26, 2010. That's a little better than GSN usually does at 2:00PM (wink).