A new report by the Media Insight Project finds that 60% of Americans between 16 and 40 pay for or donate to news. Those rates are higher for older millennials than Gen Z, according to the project, which is a collaboration between The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute. Researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 people and found that 51% of Gen Z pay for or donate to some type of news content, compared to 67% of older millennials.
Antennas, or “rabbit ears” provide completely free access to local network affiliates, typically including ABC, NBC, Fox and others. Fueled largely by millennials who’ve long sidestepped cable, antenna sales in the U.S. have risen 4% over the past year.
Price Point | Leading A Different Generation
Millennial employees can present generational challenges to older industry leaders, but great leadership transcends these differences, a trait especially needed as the industry navigates enormous change.
Its new digital news brand and soon-to-launch over-the-air and streaming network is targeted to adults 18-45. LX stands for ‘Local X’ the ‘X’ signifying the “exponential abilities that LX has in telling our communities unique stories,” according to the company. LX offers opportunities for local and national advertising through its dedicated digital site and social channels, and through its over-the-air linear TV and streaming network.
Freeform, formerly known as ABC Family, rebranded in 2016 to lose the “family” appeal and narrowly target new adults — or, as Freeform President Tom Ascheim describes them, “basically legal adults” who “haven’t quite yet found their way in the world.” Since then, very little is off limits on Freeform.
Exclusives
More American millennials now subscribe to a video game service than to a traditional paid television service, according to a survey on Monday, as consumers favor new forms of entertainment that are shifting the broader media landscape.
The flight of younger viewers from traditional TV has sent currency ratings for the first full month of the 2018-19 broadcast season into a tailspin, as primetime demo deliveries among the Big Four networks were down nearly a quarter compared to October 2016. According to Nielsen C3 data, broadcasters last month averaged 7.98 million adults 18-49 in primetime, which marked a 22% decline versus the 10.2 million members of the dollar demo who tuned in two years ago.
The company will attempt to harness the influence of its Univision Creator Network (UCN), a group of online creators under the network’s brand, to drive conversation around the upcoming 11th season of its competition series Nuestra Belleza Latina that it hopes will lead audiences to its linear channel.
The new agreements with cable operators means Newsy’s national news programming lineup is on track to be available in about 40 million U.S. homes by the end of 2018, according to owner E.W. Scripps.
Shunning President Donald Trump, the millennial generation does what it once resisted: pay for news. As Trump wages daily war against the press, millennials are subscribing to legacy news publications in record numbers — and at a growth rate, data suggests, far outpacing any other age group.
Millennials don’t watch live TV most of the time. People aged 18-34 spend 55% of their video-watching time consuming content after it has already aired on live TV, according to a new study from the Consumer Technology Association. Only 45% of that time is spent with live television.
The Wall Street Journal reports that cord-cutters accustomed to watching shows online are often shocked that $20 “rabbit ears” pluck signals from the air. Is this legal? “I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists,” says Dan Sisco, 28 years old. “It’s been awesome. It doesn’t log out and it doesn’t skip.” WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
ABC News on Tuesday launched a partnership with millennial-focused video news site ATTN: to co-produce videos for social media including Facebook’s Instagram and for Twitter. The two will use ABC’s footage and equipment to produce stories that appeal to both companies’ audiences in a short-length format.
Millennials looking for a no-spin video news and entertainment space are flocking to Circa, a digital platform launched by Sinclair Broadcast Group last summer. Circa’s team of 60-plus journalists have apparently found a formula for creating original video-driven stories and reformatting compelling footage from SBG’s local newscasts into the kind of fast-paced videos that millennials prefer for mobile consumption and social sharing.
Attempting to dispel the notion that CBS All Access’ user base is composed of a bunch of young, urban-dwelling cord cutters, CBS Interactive CEO Jim Lanzone told a packed room full of middle-aged broadcast-industry folks at the NAB Show that the average viewer of the SVOD platform is just like them. “It’s an early-40s audience — only 30% of the audience is millennial,” said Lanzone, who wears the dual hat of CBS Corp. chief digital officer. “And the vast majority are pay-TV subscribers.”
Only a third say they expect to pay for cable TV this year. Half say they’ve already gotten rid of pay television. Many watch TV through other sources. Some don’t watch at all.
Per Mindshare, get ready for less focus on millennials (gasp!) and more on Baby Boomers. Another trend: More concern over respecting privacy concerns on social media.
Nearly a third of 18-34s eschew pay TV services. Many of them subscribe to the top SVOD services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and YouTube, but they’re also gobbling up content from lesser-known digital video sites.
They’re not cord cutters. These are the people who never had pay TV subscriptions in the first place. How do they watch TV? It’s not all OTT. They also rely on friends.
The CW’s new drama Riverdale — based on the Archie Comics characters — offers the season’s most intriguing test as to whether IP can truly help launch a show, even if its intended audience will likely have very little knowledge of the source material.
All the company needed were content-hungry millennials and an algorithm.
Imagining The Newsroom Of The Future
News directors, content managers and producers in TV newsrooms across the country have begun to realize that the old legacy model of TV news won’t fly on digital platforms. Simply “chopping up” a newscast into smaller, bite-size, separate story segments and then posting them on a station website is fast becoming an outmoded concept.
How To Get Your News To Millennials
Some suggestions from a NewsTECHForum panel: You need to really listen to the demographic’s interests, build content with a platform’s specific use in mind and deliver it to where they are — social feeds.
ESPN is way out ahead this fall, followed by Adult Swim and AMC. All but two of the top 10 networks have fallen versus last year, a pattern seen in other demos too.
Make it too hard for convenience-addicted millennials to find shows they’re fond of and they’ll move on, as new TiVo research finds 54% have “show dumped” when a show became too hard to access. The research finds millennials also spend 32 minutes a day looking for content to watch and over 6 hours consuming it.
A new study from the Video Advertising Bureau shows the youngest in the demo, 18-24s, devote just 18% of TV time to playback, much preferring live TV, which reflects their differing viewing habits as much as anything else.
In many Hispanic homes in the United States, Univision is a constant TV presence and a huge influence. Last week, though, Univision made news with a purchase far afield from that core: It bought Gawker Media’s sites — English-language, not especially concerned with Latino culture and oriented toward a young audience that is glued not to TV sets but to smartphones. What’s going on here? “The future is young, digital and diverse,” the company’s news and digital chief, Isaac Lee, said in his first interview since the successful bid at auction last week.
Given the convergence of millennials coming-of-heavy-spending-age, and smartphone omniuse and social sharing of news among this demographic, marketers love millennials. By their very youth, they make themselves more open to new brand identification than their elders. Advertisers want to reach them, so grabbing millennials has become a top priority for almost all news publishers.
While Fox has been the top-rated U.S. cable-news channel for 14 years, overall cable news audiences have been shrinking outside of presidential elections. More than half of Fox’s viewers are over 65 and the network is lagging in the digital efforts that many analysts consider key to attracting young people.
They have much less regard for traditional media such as broadcast than even millennials, according to a Harris Poll. Look for media fragmentation to really speed up.
Though time spent varies, their media usage patterns are nearly identical. They’re using more multimedia devices and watching more mobile video while listening to less radio.
The television industry is focusing a great deal of attention on millennials these days. Billions of dollars are in play, along with the reputations of industry executives who view this vast, diverse generation — generally defined as those born between 1977 and 1995 — as the hot consumers of choice in a bewilderingly changing business.
Companies bending over backward to sell to millennials are doing the one thing the cohort hates most: trying too hard. Attempts at wooing the emoji generation are often rewarded with a deafening ho-hum.
People ages 18-34 spend more time on their phone or computer than they do watching live TV, according to ComScore. In fact, the study found that mobile is quickly approaching equal status with live TV among millennials. That demographic spends 47% of its time with live television, while mobile already accounts for 40%.
Digital newsrooms are doing everything from increasing operational transparency and job flexibility to offering cross-department collaboration to recruit and retain young people known for job-hopping.
