TV by the Numbers
TV by the Numbers was a website devoted to collecting and analyzing television ratings data in the United States that operated from 2007 to 2020.[6]On June 30, 2009, in response to pressure from Nielsen Media Research, TV by the Numbers made large changes to their archives.[8] In response to The New York Times' decision in 2011 to start charging for access to online content, Gorman wrote an article stressing his website will remain free.[12][13] On January 31, 2020, the website's staff released a statement declaring TV by the Numbers to be inactive starting the very next day, February 1, 2020.According to one source, much of the information Gorman and Seidman had access to was not readily available to the media, and thus their efforts to analyze the data led to many "savvy readers" becoming interested in the workings of the ratings process.Harry's Law star Kathy Bates publicly bashed the website's ideas about ratings and their symbol "The Cancellation Bear", in an interview for Entertainment Weekly."[19][20] Harry's Law executive producer Bill D'Elia agreed with Bates, stating in subsequent Twitter messages, "WTF is TV by the numbers?"[22] After Harry's Law was cancelled in May 2012 and the site issued a passive-aggressive response to the news,[23] D'Elia again turned to Twitter to express his feelings on the website, stating, "TVBTN Negativism fuels belief to not watch shows.[26] Suburgatory showrunner Emily Kapnek subsequently did an interview with TV by the Numbers, explaining: "we just thought it would be really funny to have [the show's] school TV station governed by the same panic and hysteria that everyone feels watching their shows live and die and get discussed online so we thought it was just a really fun shout out because we're all on your site all the time.[2] The Renew/Cancel Index was a mathematical formula developed and used by Gorman to predict whether scripted series on the Big 5 broadcast networks would be renewed or cancelled that season.The Renew/Cancel index was updated with a new article every Tuesday, from the beginning of the broadcast season in late September to the dates of the network upfront presentations in mid-May.Seidman created the Bubble Watch which, similarly to the Renew/Cancel Index, aimed to predict based upon ratings data which television series would be canceled and which would be renewed.In October 2012, Seidman decided to stop publishing the Bubble Watch and replaced it with a simple list of the renewed and the cancelled series.He then took a break for an unspecified period of time, and longtime reader and occasional contributor Tom Shaw took his place in September 2013.Readers of the Renew/Cancel Index and the Bubble Watch inquired many times to Seidman and Gorman about why they did not predict the renewal chances of cable series.