From Paramount/CBS' perspective - was DS9 a financial success?

If nothing else, the addition of Ryan kept the show's ratings from dropping below the 4 million viewers mark (with the curious exception of one episode, "Juggernaut," that had ENT-era ratings of just above 2 million viewers).

 

It's not that curious. Air it on a Monday, before the show's Wednesday timeslot and have a new episode on Wednesday was a recipe for it being missed (special timeslot on a day before the normal timeslot= low ratings). With its mirror reversal, "Investigations", one would have tuned in on Monday, noticed no Voyager, then remembered the special day/time or looked to the tv guide to find it.

In the entire run of Voyager, "Juggernaut" was the only episode to have its rerun get higher ratings than its original broadcast. 2 DS9 episodes exceeded their original ratings in a rerun with a possibility 2 others did so too (pesky gaps with some reruns). Don't have enough rerun data for TNG. No Enterprise episode exceeded its original ratings.

Star Trek was kind of on the low end. My records indicate Xena had episodes exceed their original ratings 12 times. Hercules did so at least 9 times (the series finale got a better rating in its rerun than its original broadcast). X-Files did so 13 times (all Season 1 eps though).

 

A very interesting graph to say the least.

The tough thing is that making a quality series does not guarantee good ratings, as evidenced by DS9's nearly equally poor ratings... As the saying goes: "There's no accounting for taste."

 

I've always wondered, if DS9 wasn't a Star Trek series, would it have been popular enough to have had TV movies along the lines of Babylon 5, a series I know DS9 trounced in the ratings.

 

Trounced is right. The ratings are hard to come by past the 96-97 season, I'd love to see them. IIRC, that season B5 averaged 50% of DS9's ratings. Now, timeslots was a factor. DS9 was given good timeslots (of course, some markets might not give a damn and toss it late night) whereas B5, in response to its ratings, many stations kept pushing it further from primetime leading to a situation where many viewers were complaining it was airing between midnight and 4AM in some markets. As for the movies, it was luck. All the movies were ordered when TNT liked Babylon 5 (97-98). Sometime later in 1998, they started to regret it, leading to the famous internal struggle at TNT between their 2 divisions over Crusade which ended up scuttling that series. TNT was a cable network trying to make a name for itself and it saw B5 had a very loyal audience, they liked the demographics, so they decided to go for it. They didn't like that the audience didn't spill over to other shows (who would have thought Babylon 5 fans wouldn't watch wrestling? ).