Top 10 TV Markets=29.6% of U.S. Homes

this site may help:

As it says Glendive is in Montana. It also goes into a bit of a
discussion on how the DMAs are arrived at and change over time.

shawn...

This makes it seem like the WB/UPN merger, the CW, might end up with
more stations than Fox has. That would be an interesting situation. I

videonovels...

No not really, because there's typically two WB and UPN stations in
each market. So if they sold-off all the "duplicate" UPN stations,
that would still leave only 171 WB stations to become future CW
stations.

CW will have around 90% coverage, so still behind Fox's 96% coverage.

Casey McDonald's Guidance Counsellor, Ian J. Ball...

Uh uh - I think people around here calculated it, and The CW is just at,
or just over, 95% coverage (way more than WBN's/UPN's 87-88% coverage).

videonovels...

Okay.... enough guessing.

affiliates of the CW..... covering 95.3% of the country." Hmmm. CW is
still trailing behind Fox, but not by much.

.

.

IIRC, FOX has something like 97-98% coverage.
'The Big Three' are at 99(+?)%.

do believe that the CW will still end up with lower ratings than Fox
for the near future.

shawn...

I suspect there are some markets that are small enough (Glendive :) )
that no one wanted to try and start a new station when Fox/WB/UPN
started up. Although all of them should have access to the those
networks via Dish and DirecTV.

Tony Calguire...

Thanks for that link... it was an interesting read. A lot of what I
*thought* I knew about DMAs actually applied to Arbitron's old ADI
system.

According to Nielsen's stats, the Top 10 TV markets out of 210 reach
out to nearly 30% of American homes with TVs. Are you one of almost 3?

Mac Breck...

[....]

Homes %
1 New York 7,375,530 6.692
2 Los Angeles 5,536,430 5.023
3 Chicago 3,430,790 3.113
4 Philadelphia 2,925,560 2.654
5 Boston (Manchester) 2,375,310 2.155
6 San Francisco-Oak-San Jose 2,355,740 2.137
7 Dallas-Ft. Worth 2,336,140 2.120
8 Washington, DC (Hagrstwn) 2,252,550 2.044
9 Atlanta 2,097,220 1.903
10 Houston 1,938,670 1.759

Mac Breck...

Where's Pittsburgh, PA on the list of 210?

Anim8rFSK...

Although I have no idea why Prescott is in italics after Phoenix . . .

Tony Calguire...

Probably because there is a TV station officially licenced to Prescott,
AZ that is included in the Phoenix market. Just like Washington, DC,
which includes a TV station officially licenced to Hagerstown, MD.

Neilsen's naming scheme is somewhat arbitrary... The Minneapolis-St.
Paul DMA includes stations licenced to various places like Alexandrea,
MN, and Menominee, WI, but those outlying cities aren't named. However,
the Albany-Scenectady-Troy, NY market and the Austin-Rochester, MN-Mason
City, IA market has all those cities named.

I think what Neilsen is doing is grouping together ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox,
and PBS affiliates covering a specific area. If the only affiliate of
one of those networks is located in an outlying city, then that city's
name is included in the DMA's name.