Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

There are a million ways to measure the size of a city. Density, land area, and the number of pro sports teams are a few of the most common. When determining the nation’s biggest cities, though, I tend to lean on Neilsen as the best barometer. When looking up info on other cities, I check their placement on the Largest TV Markets. I figure if everyone can see the same network broadcast, they can all be counted as the same community.

The Tampa Bay area metro market DMA (which includes Sarasota) has been 13th largest for a mighty long time. But the listing for the new season was recently released, and Tampa/St. Pete moved from 13th to twelfth largest. We barely passed the Seattle/Tacoma DMA, each of us having a little more than 1.7 million TV homes.

Can we now demand better shows from television? Can we control the type of commercials we get? Can we force networks to conform to our standards? No, no, and uh, no. But we can certainly feel superior to those coffee drinkers up there. And put Detroit on warning.

Eleven DMA’s within the top 50 moved up on the list. Las Vegas (#48) jumped 3 spots into the top 50. Providence moved out, while Buffalo moved down 3 to #49. Columbus (#32) jumped two spots over Milwaukee and Cincinnati. Charlotte (#27) overtook Hartford, and Portland (#23) passed Baltimore. Detroit fell out of the top ten, while Houston moved out. Minneapolis lost a spot to Phoenix.

Sixteen cities actually had fewer TV homes since the last update, including #5 Boston (16,000!), #6 San Francisco, and #10 Detroit. Grand Rapids, Cleveland and Pittsburgh lost a bunch too.

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