YOUTH, WOMEN KEEP THE FIFA BALL ROLLING
With young adults making for 28% of total viewership and women across age groups 47%; the World Cup hits the highs with both groups
The 48 group stage matches for FIFA World Cup 2018 have garnered 83.9 million viewers across sports channels on the Sony Pictures Network India (SPN) network (Broadcast Audience Research Council of India, all India). For the 2014 edition, as per data from TAM, viewership was around 50-55 million.
Driving viewership in the country so far is the young adult, 28 per cent of the eyeballs are from audience members between 15 and 30 years. Of this, nearly 60 per cent are male. Overall female viewership across age groups is highest this season at 47 per cent as compared to 40 per cent in 2014. A note of caution here: the two figures come from different measurement agencies and are not completely comparable.
It is not surprising that youth (15-30 years) form the biggest chunk of World Cup viewership. According to BARC’s report titled What Young India Watches, the youth are driving viewership numbers on TV. “With 32 per cent viewership for Prime Time coming from young adults, they continue to drive TV viewership,” says Partho Dasgupta, CEO of BARC India. This may seem counter intuitive since this band is seen as championing digital viewing in the country.
BARC data however reveals that the young audience segment continues to engage with television increasingly. The daily time spent watching television by this age group has increased since last year, and now stands at three hours and 34 minutes, which is almost at par with the time spent by the entire TV viewing universe. According to the report, the share of viewership between males and females is equal when it comes to the youth category, while urban youth contribute slightly higher (54 per cent) over rural youth. In terms of population, the gender ratio stands at 48 per cent females and 52 per cent males among the youth, while the urbanrural ratio stands at 54:46.
The youth contributes significantly to prime time viewership. “The contribution of both urban and rural youth is high, and this is true not just for the prime time band, but also the entire day. What is important is that with an ATS (average time spent) of two hours and 19 minutes, urban youth spends more time watching prime time TV than rural youth, which has a daily ATS of two hours and six minutes,” Dasgupta says.
However, viewership is impacted by both reach and time spent. A closer look at data shows that 56 per cent of young adults in the 15-30 year age bracket are in rural India. “This is in sync with the fact that 55 per cent of TV viewership comes from the rural belt,” explains Dasgupta.
What do the young watch? Apart from football and cricket, they are avid consumers of English entertainment channels, music and youth based channels. They also consume film based and general entertainment channel content.
How does this square off against the massive reach that digital platforms have claimed, all riding on the consumption patterns of the same young adult audience? The report hints it may be erroneous to pit the TV screen against the mobile or the computer. Dasgupta says, “There is also a notion that the youth is slowly shifting to digital, but one cannot overlook the fact that the youth is also the single largest contributor to total TV viewership and this is growing at a good pace. So they are watching both digital platforms and more TV than before.”
Also India is still a one TV screen family and that leads to high percentage of co-viewing. Young adults are sharing screen time with kids and older viewers. Advertisers would do well to pay more attention to this group that many believed had been lost to TV, especially in the aftermath of the football blitzkrieg.