Sharknado, Hype, And Twitter

With all the coverage on news shows, radio shows, and the tweets leading up to it's airing, you'd think "Sharknado" scored record ratings Thursday night. As a matter of fact, with more than 600,000 tweets during primetime (that's two tweets for every three humans), it surely had to be a blockbuster.
Um, no.
In fact, only one million people watched "Sharknado", and SyFy scored a 0.4 in the 18-49 demo. According to Bloomberg Business' Claire Suddath, that's not only a TV bust, but "[m]ost Syfy originals have an average viewership of 1.5 million people, with some getting twice that."
The Atlantic compared the twitter and viewership numbers of "Sharknado" to the Red Wedding episode of "Game of Thrones:. As you can see on the right, tweets don't equate to eyeballs.
But don't cry too much for SyFy: they make around 24 of these movies a year, at a cost of $1.5M each, paying companies who used to be direct-to-vi
deo before the market dried up. That's not even 1% of what Disney paid for "The Lone Ranger."
Read more at Bloomberg Business and The Atlantic.