How come Gardening by the yard has been moved to a time when it is so hard to watch? Saturday and Sunday mornings were bad enough, that's when most gardeners are outside gardening. But now, we have to be in front of our TV's at 6:30 in the morning to watch it! I really wish that HGTV would make it easier for us to watch gardening shows. It seems to me that they have become the HOME channel, not Home and Garden. Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me?
we've all been sending emails to HGTV.. Maybe they will change the time the beginning of February or whenever they rearrange their schedule. The folks on the Craft board bombarded them with complaings about the "decorating trend" that has taken over hgtv lately.. This year there are finally new craft shows on. Send them an email..
Posts: 1860 | Location: Staten Island, NY , USA | Registered: Sep 24, 2002
You and most of the board users are irrelevant as a cross-section of viewers to listen to. That doesn't make users unimportant as people, but numerically, there are not enough users in the forum.
Now, if it so happens that emails from non-users of the forums combined with yours are great in number, it could get some attention.
Have you ever taken time to look at the numbers which show how many users are online in the garden forums at one time?
What does it show? Maybe 2, 12, or 8 registered users on average?
And then, look at the number of VIEWS and the number of REPLIES on the forum threads.
How many?
If any have 300 replies, those are not "unique" replies. Those are repetitive replies by some of the same users. And the views on those bigger threads includes revisits by the registered users revisiting the same thread.
A good gauge, is the number of VIEWS to the threads that don't have many replies - like 2 to 6 replies. Those threads will show how many people - UNREGISTERED and registered - have glanced at the thread to see what it's about.
In most cases, the average thread that the REGISTERED users are not highly active in, is about 70 to 90 views.
That means that only about 80 people have even glanced at a thread on a website which has NATIONWIDE exposure.
That's nothing. That's not even a drop in the bucket. It's even surprising that HGTV keeps paying for the webhosting bandwidth to keep the garden forum running.
Consider this: my site centers around Oregon, but our safe woods for birds page ALONE, gets about 110 views PER DAY. If I posted a views table cell like HGTV has, our bird page would be showing 3,000 views at the end of the month, and wouldn't scroll out of sight.
The point is, the HGTV garden forum is not obsolete, but it's off the radar in the internet and business world.
In fact, the user traffic is so low, that if there were any critical emails coming from users, it could compromise the entire garden forum.
So any emails from garden forums users, about TV shows, should be in a 100% positive and complimentary form of suggestion and request.
But if it seems like any requests are not being listened too, that may be a big reason. The registered forum users are barely a miniscule fraction of the audience. If emails from non-forum users are not being sent either, that would keep the fate of shows sealed.
It's not like the user-ship of the Garden Web which has probably 10,000 inbound hyperlinks to it, and extensive international use by readers. Or like the UBC Forums used extensively.
If users from those forums emailed, it might make a difference because the number of messages would be quite numerous.
It's a numbers game.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: M. D. Vaden,
I have a reply for the "monitor". Just because my opinion is shared by about 10 other people doesn't make it any less important! I thought you would want to know how the common people that watch your network felt! It is true that I don't really watch your network anymore, due to the fact that there is nothing on but design shows. Thanks for listening.
I was more concerned with the signal that HGTV was sending ... that Gardening was being phased out... than the time of day GBTY was being aired (since we use DVRs quite a bit). Very relieved to see it back on at a reasonable time... if this is because you listened to viewers, many thanks to HGTV.
And FWIW, if statistics are what sent GBTY into oblivion in the first place, I hope that the statistical analysis is complex. For instance, we don't miss GBTY and because of it, we have seen commercials for other HGTV shows that we have subsequently watched. W/o a tool such as GBTY, i.e. a gardening 'portal', you may loose exposure to the many gardeners and viewership for other shows may drop somewhat.
