TV Platform Reach Dips, Still Beats Digital

Just as traditional TV networks are increasing their efforts to position themselves against digital media in their capacity to use more data in audience targeting, digital platforms are increasingly highlighting their capacity to deliver audience reach that compares with TV against traditional age and gender-based demos.

That’s one finding of a new research note from Pivotal Research Group.

While it is true that viewing of individual networks on traditional TV are losing reach, the platform as a whole is holding up quite well, Pivotal says.

“During April 2017, the widest reaching network among all people was CBS, which reached 67.3% of all people aged 2-99 in the United States. This was down from 68.3% in April 2016 and 68.2% in April 2015. We note that April is a relatively narrow reaching month for most networks (the recent peak for CBS was November, when it reached 76.9% of the population at that time).

Each of ABC, NBC and Fox reached 58%-64% of the population during April, followed by two networks which were each around 40% (The CW and TNT) and then another group followed in the low-30s (including AMC, TBS, FX, USA, ESPN and HGTV). Among networks owned by the largest media owners, reach against all people typically declined by 2% for the median network.

“Interestingly,” it added, “despite the heightened interest in political events — causing significant ratings increases for news networks — the cable news networks are not seeing radical changes in the numbers of people watching those networks, indicating that ratings growth is mostly a function of the same people watching more programming rather than more people watching some programming.”

At a household level, which Pivotal says is “arguably a more important metric for MVPDs looking to assess how important a given network is to subscribers or to marketers with single decision makers inside of a home, reach is significantly higher. During April, 82.3% of homes watched CBS, followed by 79.8% of homes watching each of ABC and NBC and 74.4% of homes watching Fox. In the year-ago period, the figures were 83.9% for CBS, 82.8% for ABC, 83.3% for NBC and 79.5% for Fox.”

A small number of cable networks had 40%-50% household reach.

Pivotal also noted that much of the focus on changes in media consumption is concentrated on younger audiences. “Although absolute levels are lower as they typically are, change does not appear to be meaningfully different vs. the rest of the population when looking at reach metrics for 18-34s.

“During April 2017, the widest reaching network among this group was CBS, which reached 49.8% of all people aged 18-34 in the United States. This was down from 51.6% in April 2016 and 52.3% in April 2015. We note that April is a relatively narrow reaching month for most networks (the recent peak for CBS was November, when it reached 63.9% of the population at that time). Each of ABC, NBC and Fox reached 43-48% of the population during April, followed by a handful of networks which were each around 30% (The CW, TBS and TNT) and then another group followed in the mid-20s (including FX, AMC, USA, ESPN, MTV and Freeform).”

Regarding digital platforms such as YouTube, Pivotal says: “With relatively little of the consumption on these platforms matching the relative quality of content found on TV today, the comparability of different platforms is limited, and for the present time, this helps traditional TV to sustain their relative importance to the large brands who dominate the medium.”