Media Life
10/13/06
Missing: A million viewers ages 18-34
New CW is pulling just half the target audience
By Kevin Downey
When UPN and the WB merged into the CW earlier this year, the presumption was that the new network, having the best programming of both, would retain a good share of their audiences, especially in the 18-34 demographic, where they were strongest.
Not so. The combined CW has retained just half of those viewers. The other half have disappeared, and they do not appear to have gone to the other broadcast networks or even to cable.
Just where they've gone is a puzzle to which no one as yet has answers. Somewhere out there are a lot of people ages 18-34 who are simply not watching TV anymore. Or so it appears.
Their disappearance is reminiscent of a couple of years ago, when TV ratings for young adults suddenly plummeted. It was later determined, after much research and wrangling, that a goodly share had gone to the internet and video games.
Four weeks into the new season, overall TV usage among 18-34s is down 4 percent in primetime from the same time last year, despite the addition of Spanish-language networks to Nielsen Media Research's national measurement, according to a Magna Global ratings analysis.
Network TV viewing among 18-34s is down 9 percent, while cable TV is down 5 percent and premium cable down 7 percent.
"It's a mystery," says Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis at Magna. "We haven't done an extensive analysis yet, but it just looks like a lot of them went away."
Quite a lot, in fact over 1 million. Only half the combined 2.2 million 18-34 viewers who watched UPN and WB have gone to the CW.
The rest have not moved to the other broadcast networks. Only NBC has posted a ratings increase over last season, and it's a mere 0.3 rating points.
That's not surprising, says Sternberg. "All of the Big Four networks have median ages over 40 years old. The CW is the only broadcast network with a median age around 31 or 32, which is the range where UPN and the WB were."
It would appear a good part of those departed viewers are African American. UPN had two nights geared to black viewers, where the CW has but one, meaning fewer shows appealing to black audiences.
In a Media Life poll conducted shortly after UPN and the WB merged, more than 70 percent of respondents thought black viewers would be the demographic most likely to be disenfranchised by the new network, in terms of fewer shows aimed at them
But that would explain only part of the decline. Clearly many of those former UPN and WB viewers have quit watching TV entirely.
Moreover, that erosion probably began well before the CW even debuted. A look at the ratings for the WB and UPN shows they were in a steep slide through the summer.
Rather than debuting new shows, as in summers past, the networks, by then lame ducks, went to reruns. The WB's overall audience dipped 8 percent compared to the prior summer. UPN's audience slid 24 percent.
Now the looming questions are: Where have they gone, these 18-34s?
"I think these viewers have gone to a variety of places," says Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director at Horizon Media. "They probably went off in a lot of different directions. It's become very complicated with all the choices young people engage in."
Surely some have gone to the internet. Ball State University last year found that computers have become the second most-used media device. The average person now spends 120 minutes per day on the computer, compared to 241 minutes watching TV.
"It could be the internet, it could be DVDs, it could be any number of things," says Sternberg. "The bottom line is that it's all speculation at this point. But since overall television viewing is down at the same time a network went away, the logical assumption is that a lot of them are temporarily displaced."
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_7870.asp