I'll say it once and I'll say it again: Trekkies have convinced themselves that Star Trek is some deep, cerebral SF with a bunch of social commentary, moralizing and other such crap when in reality the only series that even kinda approaches this is TNG. TOS is just dumb pulp SF most of the time and it made total sense to see it evolve into what we saw in the Abrams films.
It was on like 8 AM on Saturdays with little to no advertisement after the first season or so, so I'd say they didn't.
It got huge advertisement for it whole run and it was the four or fifth season that was move to Saturday morning and even than got big ratings.