College Hill: Celebrity Edition premiered to a huge audience after the BET Awards on Sunday evening. The ViacomCBS owned network slated the first episode of College Hill to premiere after the 2022 BET Awards to coincide with the large television audience that they received that weekend. Early ratings numbers suggest that the BET Awards lead-in benefited the series immensely, as Showbuzz Daily reports that 854,000 viewers watched the premiere.
The 854K rating number means that the show was #5 in viewership on Sunday night only behind the BET Awards, Major League Baseball and 90-Day Fiance. The linear television and it drew more viewers than Celebrity Edition Cast member Nene Leakes’s former show Real Housewives Of Atlanta. RHOA drew 722,000 viewers in primetime (8 PM EST) and it went against the BET Awards in the 8 PM-9 PM hour. Although the cast of College Hill: Celebrity Edition has drawn interest and the fact that BET brought back the franchise has people ready to watch, the BET Awards lead-in was key.
When analyzing and comparing the numbers we must put the BET Awards in it’s proper context. The awards drew in an audience for BET that it doesn’t regularly command for its typical programming. To compare ratings #’s, we searched the ratings for the 8 PM time slot for BET on Juneteenth. They showed a movie and it drew 462,000 viewers, a precipitous drop from the BET Awards numbers the week following. Real Housewives of Atlanta competed against BET’s movie showing in that timeslot and got 834,000 viewers. The BET Awards live showing was the deciding variable in the influx of viewership for the College Hill premiere while also taking 100,000+ viewers away from RHOA.
Also, they promoted College Hill throughout both the pre-show and actual awards ceremony. BET deploys a strategy of playing some of the BET+ content on the linear channel to draw they audience back to the streaming service. Ratings #’s at this point aren’t the best indication of the short-term success of the series but it helps with the long term strategy of building the fanbase for the show on BET+. However, the 854K viewership number is very encouraging as it does give an immediate indication to BET that there is an interest for a full reboot of the College Hill Franchise. Also, BET+ will possibly show more episodes on their linear channel in the coming months so it will be interesting to see how the series fares.
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