General Discussion

It should come at little to no shock to learn that Disney hasn't beat Nickelodeon in ratings since 1995. For those of us raised primarily in the 90s Nickelodeon ruled over most of our lives. Disney was the outlier, a channel you had to call up your cable company and ask for, and that would occasionally pop up for free for a month allowing us kids a peak into another world. But alas, Disney could never break the Nickelodeon spell.

That is until now. Link.

With both channels losing viewers it seems Nickelodeon lost more (30% total down) than Disney did (5% total down). Some say executives at Nickelodeon bet too much on SpongeBob, easily the biggest and over played hit in Nickelodeon's arsenal of shows. In response Nickelodeon plans a few live action shows, I assume similar to the crappy quality of Disney live actions show like The Suite Life and Jake and the Fatman.

So how does Nick recover? Or has Disney cornered that pre-teen market to well?

Or maybe these "kid" networks are doomed altogether?

I have to assume that Cartoon Network however, is doing alright. They have a great stable of shows that are accessible for adults as well, which is probably the only viable route.

Sorry for the odd thread title. Still sleepy when I began this.

@simian: Nick has like three channels on my cable (Verizon). Normal nick, nick teen, and nick toons. Teen has Degrassi and whatever other crap they sell to teens until midnight when they play old school nick shows, usually All That, Keenan and Kel, Rugrats, Hey! Arnold, and Doug. Toons plays Power Rangers and Dragon Ball Kai a lot. I bet if they combined those forces into one or two channels they would have a larger concentration of viewers per channel.

@ultimatepunchrod: Whoops. Thanks for the correction.

...executives at [Nickelodeon] heard the cry and have planned a slate of new original shows, including a live action program featuring the boy band One Direction.

It seems like Nick's reaction to this is to just try an emulate the programming that has been on the Disney channel for years already. Wanna take bets on how that'll turn out?

In its heyday, Nick succeeded because it had a strong identity of its own. To me, whereas Disney was the dumb, corporate, pop station, Nick was more real and gritty, and it tried to entertain instead of just pushing a brand down my throat. Maybe Cartoon Network has cornered the market in "edgy" stuff, so Nick just got lost in the shuffle. It's too bad.

I grew up on Cartoon Network Toonami ftw but man Nick had Doug and Hey Arnold and All That. Disney has the Little Mermaid tv show right?

That kind of sucks that they seem to be emulating Disney since I loath all their live programming when my cousins make me watch it. At least DisneyXD has the Marvel Superheroes block.

I grew up on both Nick and Cartoon Network as a child, but nowadays, Nick has been in a heater for quite a while while CN seems to be doing fine (or so I've heard).

I have a bad feeling that Nick might end up copying Disney if the new shows are what I think they are. Hopefully, things won't go too bad for them.

Programing is pretty awful on both networks. However, I am hoping the spinoff of Avatar is pretty cool that starts on Nick in April.

Nickelodeon needs Dan Schneider to make them a hit again, not just some bullshit Disney knock off live-action crap. Victorious was... annoying to say the least considering it's the same damn thing as iCarly. Disney has been terrible for a long time... they need to get back to Recess and The Weekenders and all that good stuff. Cartoon Network is doing dope. Adventure Time, Regular Show, Gumball and the Looney Tunes Show are crazy good so that's something I check out whenever I'm back from University.

...Jake and the Fatman is a Disney show?

If Nickelodeon makes a ripoff of Jake and the Fatman, I may have to watch it.

@SaturdayNightSpecials: Haha no, surprised no one else caught that. You should win a prize.

Whooooo caressss?

Not shocked that Nick was beating them in the past. Disney was never on the cable that my parents or grandma had and bizarrely it seemed like CBS (that's the channel that played their after school cartoons back before CN in the time when special time slots for showing cartoons was still a relevant concept) showed more Disney cartoons than the Disney channel did.

Honestly, I'm surprised it didn't erode faster. Disney has a pretty monster line-up of live action stuff for kids and has had such for years. I'm not familiar with it, but when my little sister was like 10, she used to watch it all the time and despite me not being aware of it, stuff like Totally Raven, iCarly, and Hannah Montana were popular enough for non-Disney watchers to have heard of them. The only Nick show I can think of during that time is Spongebob.

I don't know what Nick needs to do to get that popularity back (mainly because I have no clue what their line-up is like), but I hope that...

• with reality shows being so popular, stuff like Hidden Temple, Double Dare, that real life video game thing, Gutz, etc are still there.
• "Edgy" (edgy for a 9 year old at least) like You Can't Say That on Television, Are You Afraid of the Dark, All That (TLC did the theme song, which made this like the best show ever for me), and the Adventures of Pete and Pete type of shows are still on there
• Preteen/Tween shit like Hey Dude and whatever that show was where the theme was like, "camp anawanna, we hold you in our hearts, and when we think about you, it makes me want to fart" and then the camp leader would be like "get it right"
• they still have some decent cartoons like when they were killing it with Rugrats, Doug, Ahhh Real Monsters, Ren & Stimpy, etc.

All I know is Emma Stone really likes iCarly. I have also heard many other celebrities who you would not think watch/have heard of iCarly, really like iCarly. And iCarly is on Nickelodeon. ...I've tried watching it, but it just didn't hit.

Anyway, I wish either channel would go back to cartoons, but it seems like the live-action sitcom-y stuff is popular with today's youth market. Which I find funny since when I was a kid, I used to change the channel if the shows ever switched to "real people". But I agree with @sickVisionz that they could just dig in the crates and "remake" an older show. The Gutz, Double Dare, Hidden Temple stuff would work and as far as I know, kid game shows are non-existent now. I would say rerun these older shows, but the kids of today would probably wonder why the fuck everyone is wearing crazy shit and excited to win a stereo system that has no iPod dock and doesn't even play CDs.

Yeah Nick doesn't have any new programming really and Spongebob has really only released maybe 5 episodes a year since like 2003.