TiVo Reveals 74 Percent of Late-Night Viewers Are More Loyal to Their Favorite Hosts than Shows First Three-Year, Time-Based Analysis Defines the New Landscape of Late-Night TV Viewing
San Jose, CA November 19, 2015 TiVo Inc., a global leader in the advanced television entertainment market, today announced results from its analysis of more than 156,000 late-night show viewers1, revealing that 74 percent of viewers have followed their favorite host to that host's new late-night show instead of continuing to watch their previous favorite show. With iconic hosts, including Jay Leno and David Letterman, leaving the late-night scene and new players, including Trevor Noah, James Corden, and Seth Meyers, joining the late-night lineup, the company's first comprehensive three-year, time-based analysis explored late-night viewing to define the new behavior of viewers. The findings, which focused on three networks (NBC, CBS and Comedy Central) with the most amount of late-night host transition, revealed that a majority of late-night viewers watch based on the host of the show and not the show itself.
By The Numbers
Late-night show hosts have shifted dramatically in the last two years, leaving a drastically different viewer landscape. The TiVo Data Science team conducted two different analyses. First, the team looked at viewing behavior of 156,000 late-night show viewers, identified which viewers were fans2 of which hosts, and analyzed which new late-night shows3 they became fans of after the viewers' favorite hosts left.4 Then, TiVo clustered the 156,000 late-night show viewers based on these viewership patterns and classified each of them into the following late-night viewer types:
Jay Leno Loyalists - 37 percent - Those whose only favorite host is Jay Leno and whose viewership ceased after he left The Tonight Show.
Band-Wagon Viewers - 26 percent - Those who switched to the shows with the greatest increase in viewership after their favorite hosts left.
Stephen Colbert Loyalists - 19 percent - Those whose favorite hosts are Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, but who stopped watching The Daily Show after Jon Stewart left.
Jimmy Fallon Loyalists - 18 percent - Those whose favorite hosts are Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon, but who also started watching Late Night with Seth Meyers.
1 TiVo classified a late-night show viewer as a TiVo device that watched at least 15 percent of an episode.
2 TiVo classified a late-night show fan as a TiVo device that watched a minimum of 25 percent of 10 or more episodes from the most recent year of airing. TiVo made exceptions for the newer late-night programs where a year's worth of data was not available.
3 Late-night shows analyzed include The Colbert Report, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
4 See Venn diagrams in the story's infographic for additional details and results.
We're in the midst of a late-night viewer paradigm shift, and the loyalty we are seeing to hosts is a great reflection of the power of these celebrity personalities, said TiVo Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer. Tracking such a complex set of viewer migration patterns gives TiVo a chance to showcase the capabilities of our highly granular household-level viewership data and the analytical chops of our fabulous data science team. As a TV pioneer, TiVo continues to find new ways to add value to how we all consume the television we love.
Late-Night Lore
Never before in the history of late-night talk shows, has there been as much upheaval as there has been in the last 21 months. Six pivotal late-night chairs have new hosts at their helms, affecting three different networks and scores of viewers. The late-night talk arena has also never been so crowded. Up until 1992, NBC's The Tonight Show, hosted by Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson (in order of appearance), not only dominated the late-night landscape, but truly was the late-night landscape, skyline and horizon. There were some who made brief appearances, including Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Rick Dees, Joan Rivers and Wilton North to name a few. Then, in the early 90's, when Jay Leno took over the reins of The Tonight Show, CBS saw an opportunity and lured David Letterman to their network. That event, combined with the proliferation of cable networks, set the stage for Conan O'Brien on TBS and Comedy Central's irreverent slice of political talk.
Methodology
TiVo's two analyses measured the viewership of late-night talk show viewers and fans from anonymized TV viewing data collected from 156,732 TiVo devices from February 2013 to October 2015.
For the Late-Night Fans Versus Fans analysis, after TiVo's data science team determined which TiVo devices were fans of which late-night shows, the team followed the fans' viewership after the hosts of their favorite late shows either retired or moved to another network. To measure the fans' transitioning viewership, TiVo calculated the total number of TiVo devices considered as fans of a late-night show, and compared the number of fans per late-night show before and after the host changed. Using this information, TiVo found which fans of a particular late-night show were also fans of another late-night show (e.g., the percentage of Colbert Report fans who also were Daily Show with Jon Stewart fans).
For the Late-Night Viewer Types analysis, the team examined viewership of each late-night show for the latest year in which it aired. Since viewers can be fans of multiple late night shows, TiVo performed a multivari
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TiVo Reveals 74 Percent of Late-Night Viewers Are More Loyal to Their Favorite Hosts than Shows First Three-Year, Time-Based Analysis Defines the New Landscape of Late-Night TV Viewing 
