Why is The CW failing?

I stumbled across a thread titled this a couple of days ago on a television website I often frequent. It was discussing how The CW, one of the five commercial American television networks, has the worst ratings out of those five networks. Interestingly enough, this topic was started back in 2008, and The CW doesn't seem at all to be in a better position in the ratings than it was back then, but then again, it hasn't crashed and burned either.

Everyone has an opinion as to why The CW is having difficulties and before I add mine I thought I should say that I'm 21 years old, and male. While I live in Australia, if I lived in America, I've no doubt The CW would be the channel I watched the most. I watch Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries and Nikita, and until they were cancelled I watched The Secret Circle and Ringer, too. Hell, if I lived in America and watched The CW enough they could probably even convince to me watch shows like The L.A. Complex, and I would have checked out Melrose Place too.

Anyway, enough about my bad taste in television. I would say the demographic is the major problem, as many others have said. According to Wikipedia it's '18-35 year olds'. It doesn't specify gender, but women are the obvious answer. So how to get young women to watch The CW? Well they've got the programming down pat in my opinion. Personally, I think the problem is that young people just don't watch as much TV as they used to, and if they do, they're on their computer while watching the television, or god forbid, watching television on the computer. So the idea would be more online interactive content. Facebook, Twitter, games, competitions etc. Honestly I don't really know because I'm old fashioned and I'm scared of computers and change, so anyone else have any ideas?

A lot of people have said that that The CW doesn't promote its older and more established shows in comparison to its advertising and support for its newer ones. As I don't live in America, I can't comment, but even if they do this, it wouldn't really surprise me. As they are focused on such a young demographic if a show ends up going for longer than three years, chances are, viewers that were interested in the show at the beginning of the series may have grown-up and moved on, lost interest, or just no longer find the time for television. This is why I could understand The CW being hesitant in promoting its older shows. Why advertise a show past its prime that's constantly losing viewers (or at least it is in their eyes) when you can heavily advertise a new show that will encapsulate the hearts of new young television viewers? In this scenario, as much as it pains me, I understand why they might have cancelled shows like Veronica Mars.

The CW is a result of a merger that occured between the WB and UPN networks in the fall of 2006, one of the primary reasons for that merger supposedly being that neither network could get as high ratings as the other netowrks because they were vying for the same audience and therefore cancelled each other out of the competition. While in theory merging the two networks into The CW solves that problem, in today's TV market The CW is most definitely not the only channel of its kind. ABC Family has shows like The Secret Life of The American Teenager, Pretty Little Liars & The Lying Game, all of which I could see on The CW (as well as previous shows like 10 Things I Hate About You, Greek, Kyle XY & The Nine Lives of Chloe King). And at the moment MTV seem to have started to fast develop a similar sort of demographic with shows like Teen Wolf and Awkward (previously The Hard Time of RJ Berger).

Maybe in an attempt to extend their demographic The CW could take a leaf out of MTV's book, and produce more mature or possibly even risqué, programming content if it would get them more viewers. Nikita and Supernatural would have to be the two shows currently on the network that could break into other demographics, and Ringer could be seen as off brand too, but The CW hasn't tried all that hard to branch out as yet. Possibly there safest bet to do this would be to have shows that mothers and daughters could watch together, in the vein of Gilmore Girls, in an attempt to spread their age bracket a bit higher (just forget trying to get males in at this stage, they've got enough problems as is). Unfortunately I can't see any of The CW's fall or mid-season shows making more mature aged content, although Cult looks very promising.

Another suggestion would be to bring back comedies! I couldn't believe from doing research on this piece  that Dawn Ostroff, The CW's former President, 'publicly declared the difficulty of doing comedies for their target demographic'. What??? Everyone loves a comedy. Yes, a lot of sitcoms nowadays are hit and miss, but I could see something like What I Like About You (an old example, I know) doing really well on the network. Plus, sitcoms are something families can watch.

I was interested to see that The Bill Cunningham Show is going to The CW. While I have never seen or heard of the show before I think this is a very good move if The CW do it right. The network needs something, not necessarily national news or sports programming, but something else that's factual/ informative/ topical that their younger viewers can enjoy, while gaining older viewers, as this is the sort of stuff everyone can watch (and does). I was going to suggest a couple of shows, or variances of, that we have here in Australia that might work. There's one called The Project which is basically a news/ current affairs program, but it's hosted by a panel of comedians/ journalists and they often have celebrity guests. They present a really laid-back approach to the news that's easily accessible to all ages. There's also shows like The Gruen Transfer and Hungry Beast (which analyse commercials/ media and its effects on audiences) and The Chaser's War on Everything (which is a satire of news and politics. Much like Stephen Colbert I'd imagine). It looks like with Bill Cunningham The CW are testing the waters, so I hope it works out for them, otherwise they could try and go for something less serious in a talk show like Rove or Chelsea Lately.

Also, why does The CW not have programming on Sunday's? This seems like a majorly wasted opportunity. I'm not exactly sure how it works over there, but do they have any programming at all on Sundays? Or just nothing original? And if they have nothing original on, well why the hell not???

So do you watch The CW? Why/ why not? And what do you think the network needs to do to achieve better ratings?