The SpoilerTV 2014 Reader Survey - The RESULTS Posted

Hey all,

Recently we asked our readers to complete a simple survey to help us better understand our readers and what features we could look to improve. We have received over 340+ replies which is awesome. Thank you!

These annual surveys REALLY DO help us here are SpoilerTV to improve the site and focus on the features that people want.

I personally read every single survey form that you post.

So lets dive into a selection of the Findings.

Self-Praise Section

We've been overwhelmed by how much positive feedback we got. Below are just a small sample of some of the great comments.

i think the site perfect
I love it all
Everything, it's perfect.
I love so many things on this site it's hard to pick just one but I really enjoy the polls.
User friendly, Covering all TV series orderly arranged based on the network/cable, Respectful and friendly mods
Everything is great
I LOVE all about it! :)
It's fast and awesome
A great hub to find all the promos, photos, interviews from shows I watch.

Ok with that back patting out of the way lets look into some of the specifics.

What is the favourite thing you like about SpoilerTV?

We had a vast amount of differing opinion which is great because it means that we're catering to a large audience and making them happy.

Here is just a selection of the things you like most about SpoilerTV.

The total coverage of all shows and friendly nature of the staff and community.
The interaction and almost hourly updates. You never seem to miss a thing.
No trolls. Professional stuff.
All the news is fun to read.
Lots of info and spoilers, browse through the show by using show labels, (p)reviews, episode guide (STVplus) and live ratings posting. Pretty much everything ;)
The high quality of informations and the good ambiance on the site
The way their is an effort made to keep the comments positive unlike some other sites.
Organized types of articles, how quick they get up spoiler info, user submissions, comment moderation, and a wide variety of shows covered.
How connected you all are with the fans on this site. Also, when you guys delete fights in the comments lol.
Always first to post new things about shows
The community. All the work you put in.
Being able to find info on my favorite shows in one place that I normally would have to visit multiple site to get if SpoilerTV wasn't around.
That it has all the TV-news so quickly and I love the casting news even on small shows, thats hard to find other Places.
The spoilers du'h. And I really like that you make your videos available to us non-americans which isn't always the case with tv.com and another few sites. It's really a drag when you can't take part of the promos and stuff.
The cancellation prediction table
The spoilers and discussions in the comment section
first to post previous night's ratings
The constant updates. There is always something new on my favorite shows.
The community for sure; it's a respectful place to discuss opinions about tv shows and ratings with people as opposed to other sites where bashing is very often
I love how simple the site is. It's very easy to navigate and it loads quickly. In comparison, sites like E! Entertainment just make me want to cry.
The staff, reading the people who have left a comment who are really into the show they've left a comment in.
It is the fastest site publishing news about TV.
EVERYTHING!!! :)
It gets updated at any time of the day. Users always know the latest news!
The fact that anyone can share news. The frequent posts and the accurary of the news.
I like the on site notification and e-mail notification when there has been a rating and/or reply to my comments.
It covers the more obscure shows
The quickness on posting news and scoops on the different TV shows. The polls are really fun too.
Interacting with the amazing fans of my favourite shows.
Comments are montitored. DarkUFO is very engaged in comments and can help a conversation. Many good versatile articles and features. Live updated table. Top 25 Market ratings. Ratings before TV By The Numbers.
I like about SpoilerTV that it's one website that combines all the information I'm interested in, from ratings to reviews to discussions to casting and pilot news, and it's free from celebrity gossip.
It pretty much covers all shows that exist.
It has the most complete and up-to-date information on TV series. And I can discuss TV series with a huge community of fans.
The comments: they are relevant and never offensive
How organised it is
Its simplicity and how its constantly driven by the community
One source for pretty much everything TV related
The fact that everything is at the same place and easy to access/find.
Variety of news, updated frequently, love the new "Raina Reveals" articles!
Definitely the community. And the User polls are a lot of fun. And the ratings and cancellation chart of course!
Usually it's very accurate and if something isn't 100% confirmed you post it as a rumor. Other sites will post anything as true as long as they get clicks. Also the comment section is a little bit better than in other sites.
"There are three things:
1. The site is faithfully, continuously updated
2. No reality show coverage
3. STVPlus (I cannot stress how fantastic that is)"
The lay-out of the whole site and easy-to-comment articles.

That was just a sample of the comments we got. They gave us a nice warm feel and gives us great encouragement going forward that we're doing things right.

What ONE thing do you dislike about SpoilerTV

Ok, like everything in life we're not perfect. And that's why we like to ask the hard questions about what we're doing wrong. We take this very seriously as this is your site as much as it is ours. You're the ones at the end of the day using it.

I was very pleased to see that the majority of people simply put "Nothing", or "Perfect the way it is" type comments for this section which was nice to see :) My favourite comment was

"i usually love being asked what i dislike about something, but i can't think of a darn thing....:P"

But we did get some great feedback about certain things that I'll try to cover below. This is not all of them but it covers the majority of the popular complaints. These will be split by section.

Comments
There were a few complaints about the comments. Unfortunately these are actually out of our control as they are run by an external company called Disqus. You would need to contact their support team here if you are having specific issues.

New/Unread Articles
A number of people wanted a way to see which articles they have read and which ones they had not. As a result of this we've implemented an Unread Article feature that you can see here.

Ads on the Videos
Everyone hates ads, myself included, but they are the only way a site like SpoilerTV can exist. They pay for the huge bandwidth and storage space we eat up for the videos. We try our best to provide Region-Free videos so that everyone can enjoy not just those from a particular country. This unfortunately costs time and money and the ads you see before a video pay for that privilage.

People also ask why we can't use YouTube. We've already over the years tried YouTube, it too has ads, and they delete our accounts. Using our own Video Player we can control much better what is posted and they can't delete our account.

We will be looking at ways we can improve our current video player over the year.

Search
We realise that this is a particular area that is not done very well. As a result of your feedback, Yesterday, we launched a new search system that we are trialling. You can read about it here. We hope to extend and improve that over time.

Loading Times
During busy periods both the Site and Gallery/STV+ can run a little sluggish. We'll be looking to upgrade the Gallery and STV+ Servers in the new year when we have enough money. We'll also be undertaking a project in the new year to try to totally re-write all the backend code to improve load times on the site.

Hard to Locate My Shows
One of the most requested items was that of providing an Alphabetical list of all shows rather than having just the menu at the top split by Networks. As a result we have added this for you. You can read about it in this announcement.

Trolls
We take our community very seriously and it's one of the things we want to get right. If you think someone is trolling or spamming, simply report the comment using the Flag option next to the comment and we will take action. We want the comments to be as friendly and welcoming as possible.

iOS App
We recently released an Android App that has proven very popular. Obviously iOS users feel left out and I can sympathize. Unfortunately we have no iOS development experience and the cost to develop our own is simply far too much that we can afford right now. It's something we're constantly looking at to see if we can find a solution.

The Site Owner Dilemma

Being the site owner it's always a VERY hard balancing act between adding more features, maintaining levels of coverage, site speed, costs, technical capabilities etc.

This is why we ask you want you like, dislike and would like to see.

Here are a couple of examples of the problem we sometimes face. These are real comments from the Survey

What ONE thing do you dislike about SpoilerTV
too many sneak peeks
The competitions
Movie news. I'm just not interested.
Less generic visuals

IF you could add ONE NEW feature to SpoilerTV what would it be?
More Sneak Peek clips please
really enjoy the competitions and polls. wish we had some more during the year.
would like to see more movie news coverage
I like the thumbnails next to article headlines, but I wish they were standardized.


As you can see 2 sets of totally opposing views. I've always been of the opinion that we would rather have something on the site like "More Sneak Peeks" rather than less. It's easier for someone just to ignore something rather than not posting the info for those that do. That is our philosophy.

IF you could add ONE NEW feature to SpoilerTV what would it be?

Lots of great ideas here, some of them we've already implemented or already have available. Some are not practically possible. Below is a run down of some of the items posted. It's not all of them just some.

Note: Most people simply put None, Perfect, or "Can't think of anything" etc


fullHD video
We always post at the highest resolution that we have been given. You can click on the HD icon on our video player to play the video in HD where available.

Hiding comments for certain users
As mentioned earlier, you would need to contact Disqus to suggest that feature.

Regular cancellation prediction updates
These are already updated daily. We can't update anymore than that :)

A sort by option for the articles. Sometimes it seems like the articles are listed by popularity instead of when they were added so I feel like I miss some articles. Although, I usually find them eventually, I feel like this would be much easier.
The new unread marks indicator that we posted earlier should help with this.

A more comprehensive ratings database that also included DVR numbers, subdemos, etc.
We simply don't have access to those numbers. Those are very expensive and can only be obtained with permission from Nielsen.

Cancelation news has its own tag to access
This was introduced this week based on the feedback from the survey. Read here for details.

I know it'd be hard, but to put STV and STV+ together in one same site.
Currently impossible to do as they run on 2 different technologies. But we will look to see how we might be able to better integrate them.

I know it's imposible but, all the articles in spanish.
Ha. Yes. I would suggest using Google Translate.

Shoot this post is about 2 months to late. I had a suggestion. Looked for a suggestion box, couldn't find it and now I've forgotten. :-)
There is a feedback link at the footer of the site as well as in the menu at the top where you can submit feedback at any time.

Renewal/Cancellation table for cable shows
Simply makes no sense I'm afraid. Cable networks have different models for renewals/cancellation. You can see the current status of all shows in the TV Scorecard.

Better layout of the articles
If you can provide some examples we would be happy to look into them.

Actually, it was recently added....The Daily Round Up has filled the only void I saw.
Glad to be of service :)

being able to watch epis online on this site !
Sorry, not legally possible.

larger number of shows with their own Twitter notifications
We can only realistically manage so many. We already have 50. When shows end or are cancelled they make room for new ones to be created.

A weekly q & a spoiler column
We already do. It's called Raina Reveals!

Add ad blocker
Sorry, just no. If everyone used an adblocker, SpoilerTV would close. Ads are the only thing keeping the site in operation. If you use an adblocker you are hurting the site.

A Full Ratings Table Archive of previous years
Not quite sure what you mean but we have full historical ratings of all shows and episodes in the ratings database.

The option to view only information about shows I'm interested in on the main page.
This is not possible with the server/software platform we run on. However this is available in STV+

What ONE show that we don't currently cover would you like to see added?

This section surprised me the most. I thought there would be one show that we missed, or overlooked. However, out of the 340+ submissions no two people suggested the same show. So I think we're pretty much covered.

There were however some generic entries.

More BBC/UK Shows
Animation
Canadian Shows
etc

We do try to add new shows all the time but it's a juggling act of if we can find people to cover it, have access to information/spoilers etc and if there is enough interest in it.

A number of people suggested shows that we already cover. DOH!

And finally, a number of people suggested reality, competition and other non-scripted shows.

We will NEVER cover these types of shows ever. I personally hate them with a passion and is one of the reasons I started SpoilerTV so that we can focus on scripted dramas. There are plenty of other sites that cater for those shows, SpoilerTV will not be one of them :)

Right then, onto the stats for those that like this sort of thing.

Stats Breakdown

Top 5 Most Popular New Shows

HTGAWM 70
The Flash 67
Scorpion 31
Gotham 27
Forever 24

Click the images below to enlarge them if necessary.

Thanks once again to everyone who filled out the survey, it is REALLY appreciated.

We hope you enjoyed reading the results and if you have any questions please don't hesitate in asking in the comments below.

And remember you don't need to wait until next years Survey to submit any ideas/suggestions/bugs to us. There is a feedback link at the footer of the site as well as in the menu at the top where you can submit feedback at any time.