Audience-data overlap led MTV to adopt the soap opera format in the 1990s

Evidence

One day, looking at their audience data, a young executive named Van Toffler had a different idea. He had noticed something striking: an overlap between MTV’s core audiences and viewers of daytime soap operas. Maybe MTV should start running soap operas. Serial dramas, if not traditionally the hippest kind of show, had since the 1930s been solid bets; and they tended to build long-term audience loyalties. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 820