Audience flow diagrams are used to show the movement of audiences from period to period. Audience flow diagrams come in two forms:

• Source audience flow Where the audience came from for a given program; the source of that particular program's audience.
• Retention audience flow Where the audience went after watching a particular program; a measure of effectiveness of a program in retaining their audience for the next program.

The viewing decisions for individual members of an audience is represented in audience flow diagrams as rows and columns of pie charts. The three rows of pie charts in the figure below represent three viewing alternatives. The columns of pies represent times during a selected day.

Source Audience Flow

The coloring and adjacent percentages for each pie chart indicates what audience members were doing during the previous time period. For the 219 adults 18-49 who were watching Movie #2 at 9:08 PM, for example, the coloring indicates that:

• Yellow: 48.4% of the audience came from the previous half hour of Drama #6 on Network B.
• Blue: 14.2% came from Movie #2 on Network A.
• Red: 0.5% came from News #11 on Network C
• Black: 23.7% were either not watching television at 8:38 or were watching local (non-network) programming.

If this were not a simulated database , each pie chart in the audience flow diagram would also annotated with rating and share indicators:

Audience Flow Chart Detail