Stop the presses!
The advertising trade press has just awakened after a 10-year nap to discover that television is popular with consumers. Well, f*ck me blind!
That's right after 10 years of bullshit about how TV was dying and the web was taking over the world, Adweek had a piece on Monday called You Won't Believe How Big TV Still Is.
Really? We won't?
Well, guess what, Adweek, not only do we believe it, we've known it all along.
Nothing personal here, Adweek, but while you were busy publishing nonsense about how TV was dead, we were looking at the facts. You remember facts, right? That's the stuff that separates truth from bullshit.
In typical trade press cluelessness, even while they're telling the story in gee-whiz tones, they get it wrong. They published the following chart:
These charts show that television has almost twice as many viewers as online video, and that the industry is about 20 times bigger in terms of ad dollars. These are both interesting statistics, but neither is a proper indication of how much more popular TV viewing is than online video.
The proper way to do this is to compare total viewing hours. Using the numbers Adweek provides, it turns out that TV viewing constitutes about 95.5% of all video viewing, while online and mobile combined constitute about 4.5%.*
So while the death of TV has been an article of faith among the self-absorbed digital maniacs huddled in their Brooklyn walk-ups, in the rest of the world TV is kinda popular.
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Adweek in which we learn that Canada is still a country.
* To prove this to yourself, multiply the number of monthly TV viewers (283,000,000) by the average number of hours they watch (146) and compare that to the total number of online and mobile watchers (155,000,000) multiplied by the average number of hours they watch (12.5 combined.) By the way, I'm officially skeptical that the amount of video watched on a mobile device is about equal to that watched on a PC, but we'll leave that for another day.
Nicely done! General Francisco Franco is still dead.
ReplyDeleteAgenda: a self-derived directive capable of bending otherwise logical facts into incoherent bullshit.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they should call AgendaWeek. I do.
to out it politely, the digital brigade (spanning from Mr. 19bln $ to the most hopeless agency phygital git) knows that 2001 (i.e. Internet bubble burst) may be looming near again and they act as the drunken who is afraid to choke in their own vomit: they drink water with some Vitaminc C hoping they survive to tell...
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