Audience Flow Past and Present: Television Inheritance Effects Reconsidered

Television inheritance effects, inordinately high levels of audience du-plication between programs scheduled back-to-back, have helped broadcasters manage audience flow for decades. This study uses 2004 national peoplemeter data collected by Nielsen to replicate a study of inheritance effects done 20 years earlier. It finds the same predictors ex-plain either 96 % or 58 % of variance in the duplicated audience, de-pending upon the measure of duplication that is used. The research re-solves discrepancies in the literature on inheritance effects and casts serious doubt on the common practice of inferring audience duplica-tion from the strength of correlations between lead-in and lead-out pro-gram ratings. Inheritance effects are one of the most important, and robust, of all television audi-ence behaviors. Also known as lead-in effects, or simply audience flow, they have been routinely reported in the academic literature for over 40 years. Essentially, they describe the tendency of people who watch one program on a given network to stay