“Going down. Next stop: 23”

The Neilsen Company released their new market rankings this week. In January, Pittsburgh will be the 23rd largest television market. The city retained spot number 22 for nearly 5 years but was recently pushed out by Portland, Oregon. Local station managers don’t see this as a huge problem. In fact some would say that Pittsburgh has already seen the worst dropping out of the Top 10 and later the Top 20. KDKA/WPCW GM Chris Pike told the PG, “Advertisers are more likely to look at current sales in a market, what opportunities for growth there are, and those won’t be based on whether Portland has 10,000 more homes than Pittsburgh.” WPXI GM Ray Carter said, “It’s not that we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people leaving. Our loss was fairly insignificant. It’s just that other markets are growing.”