Tag: Oscars

The Oscars may report a "four-year high," but the long-term data tells a very different story. Year-to-year viewership and ratings changes are mostly noise....

tl;dr: Oscars ratings keep hitting "all-time lows," but those single-year drops don't mean much without context. A Process Behavior Chart shows the real story:...

tl;dr: Year-to-year changes in Oscars TV ratings are usually just noise, not meaningful signals. Blaming or praising the host (or lack of one) based...

As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.

Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the real underlying trend. But first, could the Academy avoid last year's embarrassing mixup?

Today's Post in <50 words: Lean thinkers don't blame individuals who are in a bad system, whether that's a presenter at Oscars, a kicker in a football game, or a healthcare professional in a hospital.