Days of Our Lives - Broadcast History

Broadcast History

See also: List of US daytime soap opera ratings

For the first three years on the air, Days of our Lives was near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings, and close to cancellation. However, its ascent to the top was rapid; as the 1969 TV season ended, it became an effective tool of NBC, which attempted to dethrone daytime leader CBS. By 1973 the show, pitted against CBS' popular Guiding Light and ABC's The Newlywed Game at 2 p.m.(EST)/1 p.m.(CST), had matched the first-place ratings of As the World Turns and sister NBC dramatic serial Another World. Due to the success of the program, it expanded from a half hour to one hour on April 21, 1975. This expansion had followed the lead of Another World, which became TV's first-ever hour-long soap on January 6, three-and-a-half months earlier. Further, Days of our Lives' new starting time of 1:30/12:30 finally solved a scheduling problem that began in 1968 when NBC lost the game Let's Make a Deal to ABC, and in its wake, eight different shows were placed into the slot (Hidden Faces, You're Putting Me On, Life with Linkletter, Words & Music, Memory Game, Three on a Match, Jeopardy!, and How to Survive a Marriage).

However, this first golden period for NBC daytime proved to be short-lived, as Days of our Lives' ratings began to decline in 1977. Much of the decline was due to ABC's expansion of its increasingly popular soap All My Children to a full hour, the last half of which overlapped with the first half of Days of Our Lives By January 1979, the network, in a mode of desperation more than anything else, decided to jump headlong against AMC and moved the show ahead to the same 1 p.m./12 Noon time slot. In exchange to its affiliates for taking away the old half-hour access slot at 1/Noon, NBC gave them the 4 p.m./3 slot, which many (if not most) stations had been preempting for years anyway. By 1986, ABC and CBS followed suit, under the intense pressure of lucrative (and cheap) syndicated programming offered to affiliates.

By 1980, Days of our Lives had displaced Another World as NBC's highest-rated soap. However, the entire NBC soap lineup was in ratings trouble. In fact, by 1982, all of its shows were rated above only one ABC soap (The Edge of Night) and below all four CBS soaps. The "supercouple" era of the 1980s, however, helped bring about a ratings revival, and the 1983–1984 season saw Days of our Lives experience a surge in ratings. It held onto its strong numbers for most of the 1980s, only to decline again by 1990, eventually falling back into eighth place. In the mid-1990s, however, the show experienced a resurgence in popularity and the show reached number two in the ratings, where it remained for several years before experiencing another ratings decline beginning in 1999, the year that Days of our Lives became NBC's longest-running daytime program (upon the cancellation of Another World). Throughout the 2000s (decade), Days of our Lives and all the other remaining network daytime serials have witnessed a steady erosion of viewers, mainly due to vastly altered viewing habits induced by cable networks and alternative genres such as reality and talk shows on minor network affiliates.

On January 17, 2007, NBC Universal Television president Jeff Zucker remarked that Days of our Lives would most likely not "continue past 2009." This contributed to an immediate ratings decline for Days of our Lives. The show was averaging a 2.4 rating prior to the announcement, dropped to a 2.2 average household rating in the months after. In an April 2007 interview with Soap Opera Digest, executive producer Ken Corday commented on the ratings decline of the previous months, "If I don't pay attention to the ratings and what the viewers are saying, I'm an ostrich. I have not seen a decline in the ratings on the show this precipitous — ever. I've never seen this much of a percentage decline." Since January 1993, WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh, PA airs Days weekdays during its 3:00 p.m. timeslot while some stations such as WJAC-TV in Johnstown, PA air the program during the 2:00 p.m. timeslot, but most stations continue to air Days at its 1 pm timeslot. With the cancellation of Passions, Days is now NBC's last remaining daytime soap opera.

Days of our Lives had finished the 2008-2009 television season with substantial increases in viewers (3.0 million vs. 2.8 million) and has risen to the #3 spot behind The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, respectively. It was the #2 daytime program behind The Young and the Restless in the much coveted 18-49 demographic. During the first few months of the 2009-2010 season, Days of our Lives increased its average household rating to 2.4, and averaged consistently over 3,000,000 viewers. It was only one point behind the #2 daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful, and has beat that soap on several days during the season. In 2010, Days of our Lives continued to increase viewership and has as high as 3.6 million viewers on several days. A substantial increase in viewership such as Days of our Lives has had lately, also bucks the viewership trend in daytime dramas, which had declined since the 1990s for all other daytime drama series. Days of our Lives is the only daytime drama series to increase in viewers between 2008 and 2010 and had reduced its operating budget, making it a profitable asset to NBC's broadcast line-up.

However starting in 2011, Days of our Lives started to lose ground significantly to the point that it sometimes occupied the last position among all soaps for both total viewership and the 18-49 women demographic. The ending of All My Children combined with the return of several cast members allowed a brief resurgence of Days of our Lives in October 2011, but ratings soon declined again. In December 2011, Days of Our Lives recorded three consecutive weeks of new lows in the 18-49 women key demo category., and again another consecutive three weeks of low ratings in the same demography during March–April 2012

As of 2012, Days of Our Lives generally ranks #3 among the four daytime soap operas on the air when it comes to the total number of viewers (surpassing only General Hospital). However, Days of Our Lives is last among all soap operas for the numbers of viewers in the targeted demographic of women aged between 18 and 49 years old.