Record six months for commercial TV
August 12, 2008
During January to June, the UK watched 2.4 billion broadcast TV ads a day, an average of 42 per person. Within BARB's total figure, commercial impacts are also up for key advertiser audiences. ABC1s are watching nine per cent more TV ads and 16 to 34s are watching three per cent more.
The figures, published in Thinkbox's Half Year Review, also show that the much-reported popularity of watching TV via broadcasters' web services – such as ITV.com, Sky Player, iPlayer, 4OD and Demand Five – seen in the first half of 2008, seems to be incremental to the broadcast TV that people have always watched. BARB's figures only measure domestic broadcast TV, and they show that people watched 3.77 hours of broadcast TV a day in the first half of 2008. This is two per cent more than the five year average for the period and compares well to figures from ten years ago, when the average daily viewing was 3.65 hours a day.
In particular, commercial broadcast viewing is performing very strongly, up four per cent on the same period last year and up 8.5 per cent on the same period ten years ago. People in the UK watched an average of 2.34 hours of commercial TV a day during January to June 2008.
That both broadcast and online TV platforms are growing simultaneously underlines how they fulfil different needs for viewers and that they can co-exist and indeed promote each other. Thinkbox's recent joint research with the Internet Advertising Bureau showed how online TV services are primarily used as a means of catching up with the broadcast stream. Thinkbox has commissioned further research to examine how and why people use online TV, its relationship to broadcast TV and the advertising opportunities it affords, with preliminary results expected before the
Other posts by Nick Snow: