Recently Enders Analysis released a report detailing why television advertising isn’t likely to be losing out to the internet in the near term. Enders believes that television will remain the key advertising medium for the foreseeable future.
Part of that reason is that its scale is unmatched. Ray Snoddy, on Mediatel, expanded a little and talked about the “hysteria” surrounding Over the Top (OTT) services like Netflix and Hulu.
It’s important to remember this, because I’ve seen a few instances recently where commentators have leapt a little too fast into a future that isn’t quite there yet.
Election Debates
A case in point is the ongoing discussion surrounding the leadership debates ahead of the 2015 General Election. There are currently two proposals on the table: a BBC/ITV/C4/Sky proposal that would see three debates featuring four, three and two leaders; and a Guardian/Telegraph/YouTube proposal.
The former has caused controversy because UKIP’s Nigel Farage would be invited to participate in one debate (yet no Green or SNP leaders), while another would see just Cameron and Miliband but no Clegg. I suspect that there is still some work to be done before any conclusions are reached.
The other debate(s) seems less clear. When the bid was announced earlier in the year, there was lots of talk about reaching more voters via YouTube and opening up the debates due to the lack of broadcasting regulations in the online world.
But it just doesn’t all hang together. A “YouTube” debate could be embedded into any site (“www.adambowie.com hosts a Prime Ministerial debate”), but could also be made available to any TV channel. Up to a point Lord Copper. A TV broadcaster could only carry it if it did abide with broadcasting regulations. And let’s not forget that the various parties need to agree to a debate’s rules. They will want to be wary of being blind-sided by someone randomly (e.g. Diana Gould and Margaret Thatcher in 1983).
That’s not to say that this hasn’t been done before. In the US there have been CNN/YouTube debates in the past as the Republicans and Democrats chose their leaders. They allowed people to upload video questions.
But importantly, the debates were also carried on CNN. I just don’t believe that YouTube alone would deliver the audiences that the parties would want.
The first election debate in 2010 on ITV was watched by 9.4m, the second on the much smaller Sky News (also simulcast on the free-to-air Sky 3 and BBC News) reached 4m, and the third on BBC1 8.6m according to Wikipedia. Cumulatively, 22.5m people watched at least 3 minutes of any one of the debates.
That reach is fundamental. YouTube just doesn’t have that (yet).
Let’s not even get into the value of comments in the YouTube community. While some newspapers have appallingly negative comments under stories, YouTube’s comments seem to be some of the most inane anywhere on the internet, despite Google’s attempts to clean them up. Will I really get a worthwhile discussion there?
What will happen?
I expect a debate will end up on YouTube. But importantly it’ll be broadcast on one of the main broadcast channels. Sky News is on YouTube anyway. BBC News has the iPlayer. I don’t think we’ll be in an STV position where somebody will broadcast something that many interested people can’t watch. The biggest issue would probably be around “sponsorship” of such a debate by YouTube, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. That might cause an Ofcom headache for television broadcasters who want to carry it.
Question Time
Elsewhere, I’ve also heard the bald assertion that “everyone” is second-screening Question Time and taking part on social media.
Well, my personal Twitter timeline might light up around 10.35pm on Thursdays, but that just indicates that I follow a lot of “meeja” types. I am abnormal.
Over 40% of the Question Time audience is aged 65+, with another 20% being 55-64. I strongly suspect that a small group of people spend a lot of time on Twitter during the programme. Indeed, I’m sure that it “trends” upwards compared with other shows. But the vast majority of the audience are not using social media.
On the 9th October edition of the programme, Second Sync has Question Time ranked number 1, with more than twice as many Tweets as the second most Tweeted programme, Celebrity Juice on ITV2. That’s 32,450 Tweets, with a strong male skew.
But that episode was actually watched by 2.42m people, and the male/female ratio was 51.5% to 48.5% (based on consolidated BARB figures).
Even if we very generously assume that Tweeters only sent a single message each (which in my opinion is highly unlikely), that means that a maximum of 1.3% of the audience was on Twitter.
OK – this excludes Facebook and other social media. And many “view” Twitter and don’t participate. But that’s still the vast majority of the Question Time audience not participating online. And this is a show that actively encourages social media usage, with hashtags, an extra guest on Twitter, and a follow-up radio show on Five Live.
Digital Day
Back in August, Ofcom released their very useful, if dry sounding, Communications Market Report. It contains an awful lot of valuable research into the UK media landscape. And of particular interest is their Digital Day research.
Here’s how people spend their “watching” media time across the week. Live TV is still massively dominant.
Can you see that pale blue line right at the foot of the chart? That’s YouTube and similar. And the dark green line just above it? Netflix and Amazon Prime (or Lovefilm as it still was when this research took place).
While I don’t doubt that they will grow over time, they have a long way to go before they usurp “old” media.
But that chart is “All Adults”. Aren’t all those young people spending all their time online now?
Well, they spend more time with YouTube, but somehow I think they actually made up a decent chunk of last weekend’s live X-Factor and Strictly audiences.
The Ofcom data tends to support this [Play with the dropdown to try different age groups].
Average time spent is the total average daily time spent watching media, including simultaneous
activity
So do young people use digital media more than others? Certainly.
Does that mean you should switch all your focus to those new media to reach young people and to engage them? Well… not really.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do that as well. And for nebulous things like “engagement” it might be a really good way to reach people – but define what you really mean by the word “engagement”.
However, we need to recognise that actually “traditional” or “old” media still reach more people. And they still get the lion’s share of the time spent with media too.
[A question: I did spend a fair amount of time looking to find an open source of YouTube data online – specifically for UK audiences. I really couldn’t find it. I thought that Google might have it themselves, but even their case studies are decidedly out of date in places. Obviously there are people like ComScore who publish data, but that’s not open to all. Any suggestions would be welcome.]