Little Rock Falls a Spot, Still Plays Big in Nielsens

Show me the screens.

A city, it could be argued, is only as big as its television market. For many, market size is not so much tied to a city’s population but to the number of TV sets a metro area can deliver.

Consider San Antonio. The home of the Alamo is the nation’s seventh-largest city with 1.4 million people (and a metro population of 2.3 million). Yet it’s the No. 32 TV market in the U.S., delivering 907,000 TV homes, according to Nielsen.

Little Rock, on the other hand, plays bigger than its city-proper population of roughly 200,000 suggests it would. The Little Rock-Pine Bluff market, which includes Lonoke, Saline and Faulkner counties, is the country’s No. 57 television market. And that’s down from 56, a spot it held for several years.

Nielsen’s recently released numbers for 2015 give Little Rock a total of 547,650 TV homes, dropping it behind Richmond, Virginia. Arkansas has three more TV markets among the 210 total U.S. designated market areas rated by Nielsen, and three more markets include parts of Arkansas.

Northwest Arkansas — officially Fort Smith-Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers — comes in at No. 100 in 2015 with 296,160 TV homes. That’s up a spot from last year. Jonesboro again is the nation’s No. 181 market with 78,470 TV homes, according to Nielsen.

And just beyond our borders, Memphis, whose DMA covers a chunk of east Arkansas, came in at No. 50 with 636,140 TV homes; Shreveport, whose market includes Texarkana, was 83 with 368,410 homes; and Monroe, Louisiana, which shares its market with El Dorado, was 137 with 170,120 homes.

Other notable markets in the region include Oklahoma City at No. 43; Tulsa at 60; Springfield, Missouri, at 75; Jackson, Mississippi, at 95; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at 93.

The nation’s top 10: New York with 7.4 million TV homes; Los Angeles, 5.5 million; Chicago, 3.5 million; Philadelphia, 2.9 million; Dallas-Fort Worth, 2.6 million; San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, 2.5 million; Washington, D.C., 2.44 million; Boston, 2.41 million; Atlanta, 2.38 million; and Houston, 2.37 million.