It’s Crowded at the Top

Times Now claimed that it was the number one English news channel during Obama’s visit as it “garnered the highest relative viewership share of 31 per cent as compared to 25 per cent of CNN-IBN and 23 per cent of NDTV 24X7,as per the data released by TAM”. NewsX,a comparatively new entrant in the English news space,also claimed it was the number one channel in the same period. Likewise,CNN-IBN also claimed the highest viewership. Even after the general budget this year,all the top business channels,including CNBC-TV18,ET Now,Bloomberg UTV,claimed to have got maximum viewership.

Not all channels can have higher viewership than each other during a given period. And it cannot be that channel heads cannot see the vacuity of their claims. Yet,they do make such announcements in shiny big ads splashed across newspapers,magazines,trade websites,hoardings and even in mass e-mailers.

Is it possible for all news channels to be number one in the same period? According to Mumbai-based television audience measurement agency,TAM Media Research,if all channels have the same percentage of viewership,they could all be number one; but practically,this doesn’t ever happen.

So are the channel heads lying? No,they simply torture the data and you have to read the fine print to figure how. When Times Now claimed that it had the highest relative viewership share during the Obama visit,the channel was looking at only male viewers above 25 years,from the A & B socio-economic background,across the markets that have more than one million population. “It is a practice among news channels to use the data according to what they think is their important market,” said a senior executive of Times Now,who did not wish to be named. Justifying the focus on only the Sec A and B male viewers in measuring its viewership,he said,“That’s the discerning segment of viewers that the advertisers are interested in.”

TAM,which generally releases weekly,and not daily,data,captures news audiences across all the socio-economic classes and not just from the top segments. Channels,however,slice and dice this data in ways that would put them on the top. So,while some will focus only on metros,others will include viewers from the entire cable and satellite universe. Some will include all viewers above the age of four,others will focus on 25-plus and some others on 35-plus audience.

The e-mail from NewsX was even more interesting. It claimed that the channel was most viewed but on the internet during Obama’s visit. Industry observers say these are marketing gimmicks.

While internal stakeholders,such as the channel owners,and advertisers know what the game is about,the target of such exercises is the naive viewer. “In a cluttered industry like ours,one needs to scream from the rooftop to announce one’s presence and also,to make people believe one is a serious player,” says Gareth Eswin,marketing head,NewsX. “The kind of work we do is very subjective. Each one of us feels we are doing better journalism than others and hence,the claims.”

Payal Khandelwal