Viewership Is Up but Ratings Are Down—What's Going On?

Our show is especially popular among imaginary viewers

There's a problem with the metric that TV networks are asking everyone in the media to look at when it comes to viewership: At least from an advertising perspective, it includes unicorns.

This season more than ever before, networks are bragging about live-plus-seven (L+7, or L7) viewership, the metric Nielsen uses to measure everybody who watched the show on DVR within a week of the original air date. The increases that L7 shows are staggering. Even well into the season, The Good Wife got 50 percent more viewers in the demo last week when you count people using DVRs; Sleepy Hollow recently saw a bump of 80 percent.

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