Talk:Bade/@comment-5121648-20120521211057/@comment-3247345-20120522043134

The thing is that ratings don't really say anything about how popular a ship is, since ratings are affected by many factors. One huge factor is that they use a tiny sample of the population and extrapolate. I may not be a statistics expert, but I do know that means that a tiny shift in what that sample watches can have a huge effect on the numbers they get, even if that number isn't correct for the population as a whole. On iCarly, iSYL got 12.4 million views while the Seddie arc got less than half that. But there's no question that there's more Seddie shippers online. The people that care enough about shipping that they come online make up such a tiny portion of viewers that it really doesn't affect ratings. The point is that since so many things affect ratings, you can't really say ship X caused ratings to go up or down.