TAM Data Says CNN IBN Was Most Watched As Poll Results Unfolded
News channels take elections very seriously. Election coverage is to general news channels what budget coverage is to business channels—the definitive event that establishes the street-cred of a channel. The ratings on that day also determines the bragging rights to being the channel that is ‘most trusted’ when it matters the most.
On Monday we reported, citing data from aMap, that NDTV24x7 was the most watched english news channel on election day. Now the data from TAM is out—and the verdict is that CNN IBN was the channel of choice for Indians on counting day.
Data from TAM, short for Television Audience Measurement, a unit of AC Neilsen, is the industry currency used by most media planners. aMap, however, provides data overnight.
In this analysis, we are considering three different demographics for English news channels and four for Hindi news. Here’s why. While All India data captures which channel was watched most across the country, data specific to the six metroes and cities with population of more than one million, captures which channel was watched most in areas where viewers of such channels are concentrated.
“Over 75% of the viewership in terms of gross impressions (eyeballs) for English news channels are contributed to from the top 6 metros. An additional 15% are from the rest 1mn+ markets as reported in TAM. The less than 1mn markets contribute less than 10% of the gross impressions for English news channels. Hence, for analysing news channels one would usually look at the higher population strata markets,” said Premjeet Sodhi, chief planning officer at Lintas Media Group.
CNN IBN leads the pack among English channels across all three demographics—All India, Metros and one million-plus cities. Times Now was second and NDTV 24x7 came third. Interestingly, on 9 May, the Saturday before counting day, Times Now had significantly higher viewership than CNN IBN, but when it came to election day, viewers moved to the Rajdeep Sardesai-Yogendra Yadav team.
It’s also rather ironic that viewers moved away from NDTV 24x7, which in a sense was founded on election coverage—founder Prannoy Roy, a trained economist, pioneered psephology on television in India. He was the face of elections on TV in the pre-liberalization era, when India had only one TV channel—the state run Doordarshan. Both Arnab Goswami (Times Now) and Rajdeep Sardesai (CNN IBN), star anchors and editors, sharpened their craft at NDTV, under Roy, before moving on to head up rival channels.
Among Hindi Channels, the story is not much different from the aMap data, and shows very little variation between demographics. AajTak, Star News and India TV are at the top three positions, in that order. In the Metros, Zee News beat India TV to No.3. Aaj Tak and Star News gained viewership from the week ago, while mostly everybody else declined.
Here’s the complete data on Hindi news channels.
Compared with 2004 general elections, TV viewership has zoomed this elections, showing a significant increase in the penetration of the medium in these years. And English news channels made more gains in terms of reach than Hindi channels. While the reach of Hindi news channels (all India) grew 13.5%, that of English news channels grew 122.9%. Here’s a detailed chart on how the two genres performed during counting day in 2004 and 2009.
@sruthijith
May 20, 2009 10:41 AM ET
Posted In: Advertising, Media & Publishing, TV, Research & Metrics, Companies, NDTV, Network18, Times Group (BCCL)
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