The TV industry’s own figures suggest most under-40s are no longer watching
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today we dig into the first months of Total TV data to look for audience trends. Further down, a good day for the radio players on the Unmade Index.
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Will broadcasters ever reach 20m weekly viewers again?
Back in May, the TV industry finally started sharing a new metric: Total TV. Combining viewing numbers not just for linear television broadcast over the airwaves, but also ad-supported streaming, the number helps the broadcasters put their best foot forward.
Intended to counteract the headlines about falling overnight audiences, the Total TV number is a way for the industry to credibly argue that it retains reach and relevance. Which is fair enough: overnight linear viewing is one part of the puzzle; live streaming is another, while catchup and on-demand viewing is yet another piece.
The numbers are clear, of course, as is your writeup of them Tim – but there’s also a bit of the classic visualisation mis-direct going on in the charts. The axes not starting at zero make the falls across the survey weeks look more dramatic than the written commentary details.
That’s a fair point, Andrew, and I am against people skewing scales to exaggerate a point. In this case, I’ve gone with the defaults used by Infogram, which is the tool I use to draw graphs. For added context, I’ll also add to the bottom of the post a single graph showing the three sets of numbers together. Cheers, Tim