“A popular game show in which contestants need to answer trivia questions on a variety of topics that has been running on US tv for nearly 45 years, and has been syndicated around the world.”
“What is Jeopardy! ?”
Jeopardy! debuted on NBC in March 1964 and the quiz show has been a top-rated fixture of the American television landscape ever since.
Contestant Ken Jennings holds the record for greatest amount of prize money won in one day ($75,000, on 23 July 2004) as well as the longest winning streak (182 calendar days) and greatest overall amount won ever ($2,522,700).
Jennings (b. 1974) has since become a minor celebrity in his own right (in the world of quiz nerds and trivia buffs, anyway) and has written two books on trivia and continues to be active in the quiz/media world. He also runs a blog, and posted this curious map a while ago.
It was published at the show’s 35th birthday (in 1999) and shows exactly where in the US Jeopardy! at that time was popular and where it was not (or less so).
- Trebekkies (after the host Alex Trebek) watch the show most avidly. These are concentrated in South Dakota and Mississippi (whole state covered), Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Vermont, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Montana.
- The most trivia-challenged states are Utah (entirely) and (for a large part) California, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Indiana and Ohio.
Jennings, for once, doesn’t have an answer for the discrepancies in this map. To be fair, it’s quite unclear how the data on this map were collated. Anyone?
Many thanks to Kathleen Mikulis for sending in this map.
I’m pretty sure, whatever this data is based on, that a lot of this is related to what time the show is on the air. When I lived in the dark-brown region of Kansas, I was in 7th grade, and Jeopardy! was on the air at… I think 5:30pm, or maybe 6:30. Everyone we knew watched it before dinner, anyway.
Most of the rest of my life apart from that one year, I’ve lived in the Dallas area, which is light brown, and where Jeopardy! is shown at either 3pm or 3:30pm, before even schoolchildren are home to watch it.
Comment by Kym — December 11, 2008 @ 3:41 am
In some of the more rural areas, it may not even be available.
Comment by JimJJewett — December 11, 2008 @ 5:40 am
> it’s quite unclear how the data on this map were collated. Anyone?
Why not ask Claritas, Inc. or Mediamark Research, Inc. ?
Comment by Onkel Tobi — December 11, 2008 @ 7:33 am
I agree with Kym, it probably has something to do with the air time in the local TV market.
It’s interesting though, that many of the larger metropolitan areas in the US are listed as less avid watchers. Do rural affiliates tend to place Jeopardy! at a better time slot than urban ones?
Comment by boznia — December 11, 2008 @ 10:36 am
Jeopardy! is on at 7:30 here in central IN. When our kids were small, we taped it and watched it after they went to bed. They’re in their 20s now and we continue to tape, watch later and love zipping through the commercials. I’m surprised that Hoosiers don’t watch Jeopardy! much, according to this map.
Comment by szreader — December 11, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
I need to say something about the choice of colors. I kept looking at the reds thinking they were the “highest” category. Whoever made the map should have switched those top two, imho. Nevertheless, pretty interesting.
Comment by Vince Hradil — December 11, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
Some of the watching of TV here might have to do with unemployment rates?
http://thepanhandlersguide.com
Comment by Jeff — December 11, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
I would like to suggest that strangemaps try out for Jeopardy! I notice that a large percentage of questions deal with geography.
Comment by El Santo — December 11, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
Those are media markets, so I’m guessing it probably has to do with Nielsen ratings or somesuch.
Comment by chancelikely — December 11, 2008 @ 7:37 pm
Um… seems like Mississippi is not wholly covered by “Trebekkies”…apparently the western tip of its coast “rarely tune in” the show. (Hancock and Pearl River counties, according to Live Search maps).
Comment by sgenius — December 12, 2008 @ 12:01 am
Data collection? They probably got it the same way they know that x million people watched the Super Bowl or anything else on tv.
Comment by BAT — December 12, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
The data are from Nielsen ratings. Claritas, is a subsidiary of theirs who provides data sets for commercial purposes. Given that there are four categories my first guess is that these are separated by quartiles. The color scheme is somewhat confusing, I thought the red-shaded areas would have the highest ratings, but it looks like they’re ranked #2 behind the darkest brown.
Comment by Nick — December 12, 2008 @ 6:01 pm
That it’s Nielsen ratings leads to some interesting features on the map. For example, the Salt Lake City market, according to Nielsen, covers the entire state of Utah, the Northeastern 3rd of Nevada and a sizable chunck of Wyoming. It would be impossible to have more than one color in Utah in this map. Similarly, Denver has a strange market that acounts for the low interest not just in Northern Colorado, but also all of the low interest areas of Nebraska and much of Wyoming, including the parts on the Montana border.
Comment by Sean — December 12, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
Missippi may not be total Trebek-heads, but it seems Hawaii is. With the recent Nielsen revelations in the comments section, this makes sense (but does anyone really live in Hawaii outside Honolulu? Aren’t the other islands just uninhabited? )
Comment by David Kendall — December 14, 2008 @ 9:26 pm
It seems that there is a correlation between Jeopardy viewing and urbanisation… most Major population regions are “trivia-challenged”: LA, Bay area, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicagoland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, D.C., Dallas, Houston. The Atlanta region is a gaping hole in the middle of Trebekkies.
NYC, Seattle, Portland and Boston, while not trivia-challenged, all have a lower viewership than their surrounding regions.
As the caption on the map said, the biggest viewers are people who never went to college – and urban centres tend to have a concentration of college graduates.
It would be interesting to contrast Jeopardy viewership with voting patterns… it seems that red states like jeopardy a lot more than blue states.
Comment by Daniel P — December 15, 2008 @ 12:39 am
Irony = Jennings is from Utah.
Comment by Cliff — December 15, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
And is there a Canadian map now that it dominates like Gort over the evening CBC-TV network?
Comment by Bill Lee — December 15, 2008 @ 9:40 pm
How does it correlate with concentrations of older (anglophone)population?
Comment by LG — December 18, 2008 @ 2:22 am
I work in the media business, so this is my educated guess.
Claritas is a company that specializes in geo-demographic segmentation for marketing purposes. They review basic demographic data of dozens of “block groups” each ZIP code, such as age, education, income, occupation, etc. Based on the unique makeup of the people living there, each ZIP Code is assigned one or several of sixty-six “clusters”, based on the shared socioeconomic characteristics of the area. The clusters each have snappy names and short one-line descriptions encompassing the key demographic for the cluster. These clusters “range” from #1 Upper Crust, the elite multi-millionaires at the top of the nation’s economic hierarchy, to #66 Low-Rise Living, the poorest of the poor. A listing and description of the 66 clusters can be found online.
The other company, Mediamark Research (MRI) surveys about 100,000 people twice a year on their media habits, and cross-tabulate them with the respondents demographic characteristics. So in the case of “Jeopardy”, they could determine that viewers of this show tend to be older, less educated, and less affluent than average.
Claritas then determines how well each ZIP code matches up to Jeopardy’s demographics as determined by MRI, and make the determination as to whether these ZIPs are heavy Jeopardy viewers (”Trebekkies”), light viewers (”Trivia-Challenged”), or something in-between.
Since Claritas is owned by Nielsen, they may be taking county-based ratings into account as well, but my guess is probably not, since that would add complexity to the analysis without yielding any additional practical insight.
Comment by Chuck H — December 24, 2008 @ 4:32 am
Or they might have just made it up to look interesting.
Comment by Charlene — December 27, 2008 @ 4:58 am
@El Santo: But if he does that, then we will know his real name! :P
…Or he could always sign up as Strange Maps…
Comment by Watson Waterstone — December 31, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
What newspaper did this come from? My bet would be the Cleveland Plain Dealer, based on the fonts.
Comment by Grace — January 5, 2009 @ 9:51 pm
it is very cute
Comment by اس ام اس باحال — January 17, 2009 @ 1:48 pm
trebekkies? arghhhh bad pun.
Comment by trebekkie — January 22, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
” Claritas is a company that specializes in geo-demographic segmentation for marketing purposes. They review basic demographic data of dozens of “block groups” each ZIP code, such as age, education, income, occupation, etc. Based on the unique makeup of the people living there, each ZIP Code is assigned one or several of sixty-six “clusters”, based on the shared socioeconomic characteristics of the area. The clusters each have snappy names and short one-line descriptions encompassing the key demographic for the cluster. These clusters “range” from #1 Upper Crust, the elite multi-millionaires at the top of the nation’s economic hierarchy, to #66 Low-Rise Living, the poorest of the poor. A listing and description of the 66 clusters can be found online.”
thanks
goooooood
Comment by top — January 23, 2009 @ 9:00 pm
[...] Side Fact. Jeopardy is viewed the most by mouth breathers. [...]
Pingback by “Facts about Final Jeopardy” 5-13-9 « — May 14, 2009 @ 4:21 am
Vielen Dank
Comment by moon — July 3, 2009 @ 5:31 am
Muchas gracias
Comment by sun — July 4, 2009 @ 7:59 am