Manhattan Adult Entertainment: O’Brien Talks Down to Final Details
For much of the past six months, Mr. O’Brien has been losing almost 2 million viewers from the audiences Mr. Leno formerly reached. But many of those were older viewers. His losses among viewers between 18 and 49 years old were a considerably smaller portion of that falloff. Mr. O’Brien’s audience has consistently had a much lower median age than what Mr. Leno scored—and even lower than his main competitor, David Letterman on CBS.
In the past week, Mr. Polone pointed out, Mr. O’Brien – in the midst of his hugely publicized rift with NBC — has soared in the ratings, dwarfing the number Mr. Leno scored a year ago in the young audience NBC prizes.
He used that success to argue that Mr. O’Brien should have received more time in the 11:35 time period, citing the attention surrounding the battle with the network as the kind of event-like incident that could ignite a late-night star’s ratings. He pointed to the famous interview Mr. Leno conducted with the actor Hugh Grant after he was in the news for soliciting a prostitute.