Other than frenetic zapping: it is the laziness of the remote control that makes the fortune of the television channels. Or, to put it better, it is precisely the inert and irrational attitude of the majority of Italian viewers that plays into the hands of the audience, in particular that of the "program following" the one of greatest interest (typical example: newscast after the game of football) and consequently to benefit the ratings and revenues of the network.
The curious trend (typically Italian) emerges from the research "In Micro-Costs: Inertia in Television Viewing" conducted by Fabrizio Perretti, of the Department of Management and Technology of Bocconi University and by Constança Esteves-Sorenson, of the Yale School of Management.
The two scholars have thoroughly analyzed the habits of small-screen consumers in Italy, concluding that their attitude is very often absolutely irrational: in fact, no logical reason can explain the inertia of viewers who stay on the same channel for a long time after the program they were interested in is finished.
According to the criteria of a few years (or decades) ago, all this could have been explained with what the literature calls "research costs": that is, translated in a nutshell, how much it "weights" to change the channel. Objectively, right now, very little: not only the remote control allows you to do it at any time, but then with the quick and intuitive search tools of modern digital or satellite offers, as well as due to user habits, increasingly dependent and " junkies” from the very varied offer, zapping is always lurking.
The analysis thus shows that a 10% increase in viewership for one program automatically translates into a 2-4% increase in viewership for the next broadcastregardless of the attractiveness of the programs broadcast on the other channels. In fact, according to the research, the phenomenon is not affected by the number of competing channels offering direct broadcasts of the same genre, nor by the launch of unreleased programs at the same time (factors which should increase the reward for changing channels and should decrease the inertia , if the spectator behaved rationally).
But if changing the channel is so easy, then what is the cause of such unexpected laziness? The most probable cause, according to Perretti and Esteves-Sorenson, of viewers' inertia is procrastination: changing the channel with the remote control has such a small "cost" that viewers believe they can do it at any time. And, therefore, they end up never doing it, or at least only late. It is also a typical mechanism of other consumer behaviors, such as not making a phone call to join a pension plan or not giving up a gym membership even when you stop going to it.
In any case, one thing is certain: all this does not bother the television networks at all, which indeed derive a sensational advantage from it: the estimate of advertising revenues attributable to the irrational procrastination of viewers is in fact equal to 20-40% of the profits of TV channels.
