Given a diet of US imports such as Gossip Girl, Friends, and Lost you’d be forgiven for thinking that most American television viewers were about 20. But figures this week have revealed that the average age of those watching TV in the US has tipped 50 for the first time.
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A study of the big five broadcast networks from research firm Magna Global shows that the average viewer no longer falls within the coveted 18–49 demographic so sought after by advertisers. The median age of the population in the US is 38. For the 2007/08 seasons CBS attracted an average age of 54, ABC pulled in the 50-year-olds, NBC managed 49, Fox’s viewers were a younger-still 44 and The CW (which airs Gossip Girl and Smallville) comes out at 34. If you factor in viewings on DVRs, the average age drops by a year in most cases, though that is still higher than it’s ever been.
The youngest show on CBS was Big Brother (45) while the oldest was news and investigations flagship 60 Minutes (60). ABC varied from UK import Supernanny (41), to police drama Women’s Murder Club (57); Fox swung from Family Guy and American Dad (29) to legal drama Canterbury’s Law; and The CW from teen drama One Tree Hill (26) to family drama Life Is Wild (45). NBC’s youngest-viewing show was Scrubs (34) and its oldest was the detective show Monk (58).
It doesn’t take a detective to deduce that older viewers like crime dramas – which goes some way to explain the success of Monk, an obsessive-compulsive sleuth in San Francisco. The show has consistently pulled in high viewing figures – both on ABC where it originated and now on cable network USA – without either being a huge critical success or generating much buzz. That its average viewer is 58, making it the oldest-skewing non-news show out there, may go some way towards explaining the success of a show that got almost no press and never set internet chatrooms ablaze.
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The cable networks vary more widely. Ultra-conservative Fox News maintains a median age of 65 across prime-time and daytime programming. The Golf Channel, other news networks and TV-movie showcase the Hallmark Channel are also greyer than average, while the kids’ network Nickelodeon unsurprisingly mostly attracts 10-year-olds.
So where have the young people, except those kids watching SpongeBob Squarepants, gone? That the average viewing age drops when DVR figures are taken into account gives some indication that they are embracing new technology and setting their own schedules. Many also take advantage of streaming repeats online. The Hills, MTV’s flagship reality show, got an average of 3.7 million viewers for new episodes – but factor in DVR figures, and you add another million. In addition, episodes and clips have been streamed 32m times online. In fact The CW stopped offering an online repeat for Gossip Girl in order to try to boost viewing figures. The network still, however, offers episodes for sale on iTunes, where the latest is regularly number one – perhaps because 12- to 17-year-olds are twice as likely to use Apple’s media-buying hub as any other age group.
August 17, 2010
