The Walking Dead Tops Nielsen’s 2015 TV & Social Media Lists

NEW YORK: The Walking Dead was the top TV show on Twitter in 2015, according to Nielsen’s year-end lists, which also ranked the AMC zombie drama as the most time-shifted program and number one entertainment series with adults 18 to 49 and 18 to 34.

For the third year in a row, an AMC program topped the list of top series on Twitter. On average, 4 million people saw at least one Tweet about new episodes of The Walking Dead. People sent an average of 424,000 Tweets about each episode. Tweets about each new episode were sent by an average of 153,000 unique authors and seen 28 million times. Number two on the list of top series on Twitter was The Bachelor, followed by Game of Thrones, The Bachelorette and Empire.

For the top 10 prime-time TV programs of 2015 (regularly scheduled), NBC Sunday Night Football led with an average of 23.3 million viewers. The Big Bang Theory was second, with 21 million viewers, followed by NCIS (20.9 million), The Walking Dead (19.7 million) and Empire (17.7 million).

As for time-shifted programming, Fargo led for percentage increase in viewers. The TV-viewing audience for Fargo on FX increased 240.3 percent from the live audience with time-shifted viewing (within seven days). With the same ranking method, True Detective was number two (220.7 percent), Better Call Saul number three (215.2 percent), Bates Motel fourth (201.8 percent) and Game of Thrones fifth (195.9 percent).

When ranking time-shifted programs by absolute difference in viewership, The Walking Dead again led the pack, with an increase of 10.9 million viewers from the live audience with time-shifted viewing within seven days. Next up was The Big Bang Theory (9.4 million), followed by Empire (7.7 million), The Blacklist (7.3 million) and Blindspot (7.1 million).