The first part of Lance Armstrong’s doping confession to Oprah Winfrey drew about 4.3 million viewers to OWN on Thursday night, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings released on Friday.
About 3.17 million watched the first telecast of the interview at 9 p.m. When the telecasts later in the evening were added up, the total audience came to 4.3 million, according to a spokeswoman for the channel.
That’s a great result by OWN’s standards, but not by Ms. Winfrey’s historical standards. Some of her interviews on “The Oprah Winfrey Show†scored upward of 10 million viewers; her biggest, a primetime interview with Michael Jackson, brought 62 million viewers to the ABC broadcast network in 1993.
2013 is a very different time, and cable is a different animal than broadcast. Some viewers had a hard time finding OWN on their cable lineups, as evidenced by a spike in online searches about the channel. But enough viewers found it to make the Armstrong interview the highest-rated telecat in OWN’s two-year history, at least when all of Sunday’s telecasts are counted as one.
Previously, the title of highest-rated telecast belonged to Ms. Winfrey’s interview of Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and her family last March, one month after Ms. Houston died. That program attracted 3.5 million viewers to the channel.
Of course, that interview wasn’t promoted as heavily as the interview with Mr. Armstrong was. After sitting down with the former cyclist on Monday, Ms. Winfrey appeared on “CBS This Morning†on Tuesday and said, “I think it’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done, in terms of its exposure,†comparing it to the Jackson interview in 1993.
With that in mind, she may have been hoping for a higher rating. But OWN and the company that co-owns the channel with Ms. Winfrey, Discovery Communications, cautioned ahead of time that Mr. Armstrong’s confessional might not hit the highs of the old “O! prah Winfrey Show†in syndication. For one thing, the daytime talk show was on popular local television stations that blanketed the country. OWN is only accessible in about four-fifths of the country’s homes. It is further hindered by the fact that, in many places, it’s not available in high-definition.
The initial ratings released on Friday did not include viewers who chose to record the interview and watch it over the weekend. Nor did they include viewers who watched the interview on the Internet, courtesy of an online stream on Oprah.com. An OWN spokeswoman said the Web site recorded a “couple hundred thousand†streams.
The interview did spur a huge amount of chatter on social networking Web sites. Bluefin Labs, which tracks that chatter, found that an unofficial Twitter hashtag for the interview, #Doprah (a combination of doping and Oprah), was used more frequently than the one OWN encouraged, #OWNTV.
Notably, about 61 percent of the Twitter comments about the interview were rom men, according to Bluefin. Normally, OWN skews much more toward women, with only 33 percent of Twitter comments about the channel coming from men.
One of Discovery’s other channels, TLC, showed the interview in many countries, but Nielsen does not provide ratings estimates outside of the United States.
The second part of the Armstrong interview will be shown on OWN on Friday night. Originally, Ms. Winfrey’s producers were going to edit it down to 90 minutes, but after she talked to Mr. Armstrong for two and a half hours on Monday, she conferred with the producers and decided to break it into two parts.
It was “impossible to try to cut 80 minutes out,†Ms. Winfrey said on CBS. “As you all know, a 90-minute interview on TV is really only 65 minutes.†She added, “We felt that to leave over half of this on the cutting room floor after millions of people have been waiting for years for many of these answers would not be the right thing to do.â€
