Charts, Graphs, Facts, and Fiction

Well, the eagerly awaited death of tv and radio is just gonna have to wait another quarter.

Last week, Nielsen released its "Total Audience Report" -- which used to be called the "Cross Platform Report" and before that was called the "Three-Screen Report" (I sure hope they're better at counting than they are at naming.)

The results are surprising, even to an old cynical bastard like me. You'd have thought that with all the new apps, websites, streaming options, and set-top boxes for watching video, the people who have been yapping about the death of TV for ten years would have a lot more to point to.

But time spent with TV just keeps chugging along. And to a surprising degree, so does radio.

There are a few interesting developments. People (adults 18+) spent about 12 fewer minutes (3%) a week watching TV than they did last year at this time. There's no doubt that all the new options are causing some erosion in live TV watching, but it is much smaller than I would have guessed, and not even close to anything like the hysterical death cries we've been hearing from the same people who've been dead wrong for ten years.

To get some perspective, we're still sitting in front of the box over 5 hours a day.

Here are some charts I made to simplify things. This first chart shows overall media consumption. As you can see, we still spend far more time with TV and radio than other media. We spend over 4 times as much time watching live TV as we do on the web with a computer.

Time spent on a smart phone now exceeds time spent online on a computer.

 Correction: The above chart should be Minutes Per Day, not Minutes Per Week

(It should be pointed out that a significant amount of time spent online particularly by young people is spent doing things that are not usually considered media activities -- checking email, talking, texting, watching porn, etc.)

The next chart shows the relative amount of time spent by adults consuming video on different devices.

Despite the very impressive growth of smart phone usage (up 25% compared to last year) watching video on a smartphone is not very popular, with only one half of 1 percent of video watching done on a smartphone. As mentioned above, I suspect a large amount of online smart phone time is spent doing "non-media" activities.

The next chart shows the relative amount of time spent watching video on a TV (traditional + DVR) versus a web-connected device (computer + smart phone.)

The next chart shows that people spend more time listening to the radio than they do with their cell phone and connected computer combined.

One of the questions I'm frequently asked is whether Nielsen's numbers are reliable? Not being a researcher, I have no idea. But I posed this question to a stock analyst who covers media and who used to be the head media research honcho for one of the world's largest media companies. His answer: No, but they're less unreliable than anyone else.

In other media news, last week Google came out with an astonishing admission -- that 56% of display ads paid for by advertisers are never seen by a live human being. We have been reporting on this for almost two years now, but to have Google cop to it is truly astounding.

And yesterday, the Financial Times reported on a study done by the Association of National Advertisers which determined that online display advertisers would lose 6 billion dollars to criminal fraudsters next year. Although this number is astounding, it is actually low compared to other estimates I've seen.

Of course, none of this will have any effect on marketers. You could tell them that display advertising causes their dicks to fall off and they'd still keep buying the stuff.

It's an amazing world.