CSM reports that the median age for (live) TV viewers in the US hit 50 last season. The median age of Americans is 38. Can you guess where the younger folks have gone?
This is one of the clearest signs that the Internet is a competitor to television. While cable TV is certainly another major player, idle surfing, social networking, YouTube viewing, news reading, MP3 downloading, and email drafting has pulled Americans away from the small screen and toward a smaller one.
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Hey Piers, I’m pretty sure that number for age has actually fallen. I work for a cable network and our median age is over 55, and when we hit that number, we celebrated. (Getting younger means more profitable demographics.) You won’t find many networks that have young median age – def nothing younger than 30 – even on MTV.
but this also speaks to the way TV is measured and catalogued. The Nielsen system is wonderfully flawed and doens’t take into account a wide range of actual viewing habits, nor does it do a particularly good job of measuring viewing in urban areas – where the largest concentration of young people usually are.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:49 pm