The first Sina Weibo TV ratings report has found that audiences born in the 1990s made up nearly half (49.77%) of users who mentioned at least a TV reality show on Sina Weibo, China's dominating Twitter-like service.
The report, which was jointly released by CSM and Sina Weibo this month, also said that 63.33% of TV reality shows Weibo discussions were published by female users - a much bigger "gender imbalance" compared with TV audiences where only 54.70% of reality show viewers were female.
There is a much bigger difference in the educational background between reality show's TV viewers and social commenters: 68% of Weibo users who talked about reality shows have university and above degrees, while fewer than 25% of TV audiences have same education level.
CSM, a joint venture between Kantar Media and CCTV's wholly owned subsidiary China International TV Corp, began to work with Sina Weibo on Weibo TV ratings index in January 2014. The first report was based on the research of Weibo discussions and TV ratings of top 35 TV reality shows in China from July 2 till November 30, 2014. This report is based on 884 million TV viewers for every programme's first TV appearance and 18.94 billion Weibo reads.
From the individual reality show perspective, "Where are we going, dad?" is the runaway leader: it has generated about 7.5 million Sina Weibo mentions, followed by "The Voice of China" (4 million mentions) and "Power of Chinese Kids" (about 2.2 million mentions).
Many leading TV reality shows were targeting young students and that partly explains why audiences born in 2000s were most active because on average, each of them published 5.1 posts of Weibo discussions, followed by those born in 1970s (4.8) and 1950s (4.5).
The research has categorized reality shows into "seasonal shows" and "long running shows". "Seasonal shows" refer to those programmes whose two seasons are at least three months apart from each other. Overall, seasonal shows caused more Weibo discussions than long running shows. There are usually erupts of social buzz of these shows at the beginning and ending of each season.
Celebrities played an important role in generating social buzzes for the shows. In the case of "The Voice of China", the star jury Na Ying's name was mentioned 855,455 times, nearly doubling that of the winner Zhang Bichen (482,913).
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