Well, Monday was a busy day on Cable News.  The shutdown triggered a bunch of talk on Twitter about CNN, MSNBC, and (in third place) Fox News.  As for individual shows, The Ed Show won its hour and Piers Morgan won the day — a fairly typical pattern.  Chris Hayes’ 11pm live, second broadcast brought him a lot of additional mentions.  Rachel Maddows’s live broadcast at midnight (which will be reflected in the 10/1 report) brought in over 1000 mentions, although by 1am Tuesday the crowd has started to thin out: The Last Word only garnered 237 mentions.

A big bump hit Chuck Todd on Monday with nearly 7000 daily mentions — good for second place after Piers Morgan.

If nothing else, we can say one thing for sure: the Shutdown is good for Cable News.

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I’m working on an algorithm that will give me the estimates of the ages of people who tweet.  It’s still in the process of being refined, but I thought I’d share some preliminary results:

Click for poster sized version!

I took the data from my Cable News Twitter Ratings for 9/29, and estimated the age of the sender of every tweet.  Some I could not, but a large percentage I could estimate.  The chart (you really want to click on it) gives the breakdown of the ages for each of the networks.

E! News and FXX (Totally Biased w/ W. Kamau Bell) tend to skew the youngest over all, while of the traditional networks CNN and HLN have younger correspondents in the Twitterverse than MSNBC, Fox News, and Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.

Some important notes:

First, this represents ages of people who tweet, not necessarily people who watch.

Second, what’s being added up is the age per tweet, not per sender. If you’re 30 and send one tweet and I’m 50 and send two tweets, it will show 33% 30 year olds and 66% 50 year olds.  I will probably change the logic behind this to only count each sender once, but for now that’s what I’m doing.

Finally, the whole process is still being refined, and I expect better answers to come out of the program over time, but it’s still interesting to see the picture as it starts to form.

Yesterday’s winner was The Melissa Harris-Perry show, while CNN still drew the largest audience overall.  

Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.

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OK, something happened with CNN yesterday.  I’m not sure what, but it’s mention count is off the charts.  Beyond that, Up with Steve Kornacki had the best hour and best day of any show.  What the heck is everyone doing up so early?

Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.

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Looks like we’re back to the MSNBC, Ed, and Piers show on Friday.

I apologize for not having the ALMA awards in the mix, so the 10 o’clock hour is only the other networks.  Still, Bill Maher won that the hour, which is pretty good for a show on a premium network.  Once again, E! News is the most “female” of networks, Fox & CNN are tied for most “male”, and MSNBC is closest to a 50-50 split of audience.

In today’s update, I have started counting tweets to the general network accounts (e.g., @FoxNews) for the overall network ratings, even if the tweets don’t mention any individual show.  My observation is that there isn’t a lot of them, but those that there are I’ll count.

Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.

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