Telemundo's Miss Universe Ratings

Telemundo did well with Monday night's airing of the Miss Universe competition, which was also simultaneously broadcast in English on NBCU.

For the first half hour, the Hialeah-based network garnered a 1.0 rating as measured by the Nielsen Television Index or an estimated 1,633,000 viewers. By the final half hour of the two-hour program the number of viewers had increased to 2, 270,000 and a 1.2 rating. These are very strong numbers relative to Telemundo's usual performance. On weeknights, Telemundo telenovelas at 8pm, 9pm and 10pm generally bring in around one million viewers apiece. Occasionally, Zorro and La Esclava Isaura (see here for the latest ratings and here for background on Telemundo and Brazilian Telenovelas) bring in upwards of 1.2 million viewers.

Despite Telemundo's strong showing with Miss Universo, the NBCU-owned network still got beat by Univision.  "Destilando Amor" had more than twice as many viewers in the first half-hour of the beauty contest while Cristina had 400,000 more viewers during the last half hour of Miss Universo.

Those numbers point to the uphill battle Telemundo faces against Univision. The Miss Universe competition is intensely popular throughout Latin America and among U.S. Hispanic. Why? Maybe it is the high number of Latin American finalists and winners. Maybe other factors are at play. I don't know. I do know that the show is an enormously popular franchise among Latinos (for better or worse). And if Telemundo can't beat Univision even with Miss Universo, well, I don't know if there is much hope of any real competition between the two networks. Not a surprise but dramatic nonetheless to see the Univision and Telemundo ratings side-by-side.

What is a bit of a surprise is the number of people that opted to see the show in Spanish rather than English (2,270,000 Telemundo viewers versus 8,344,000 NBCU viewers). I'll request historical data and see if I can't get a sense of whether broadcasting the show in Spanish added new viewers or simply cannibalized audience members from the English-language show.

Either way, from an advertiser perspective, splitting up the audience is probably more attractive and more effective.