Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011. Its figures are from 2011: a panel of 4,600 households, 25,000 viewers per household of seven, and 7.6 million euros in advertising per audience point. The example show, Con H de Eva, is from that period.
When some people hear talk of audience share in phrases like “4 million people watched the programme”, what few of them know is that the real audience share cannot be measured, nor can the number of people who watch a programme. Just 4,600 households decide the programming that is shown in Spain, because they are the only ones with a people meter installed at home.
The meter is installed in a home, and the company in charge of installing it records the number of people who live there. Let’s say that in a household of 7 people, what they watch on television counts as 25,000 viewers in the audience figures. In other words, if 100 of the 4,600 households with a meter watch, for example, Con H de Eva, Eva Hache would already have an audience of two and a half million, and her show wouldn’t be cancelled.
In short, 100 households could change the fate of a schedule and sway advertising spending, which is what television channels live on.
Audience measurement isn’t reliable: programmes with an excellent real audience share could be cancelled while others that very few people actually watch stay on the air.
That would explain why many people can’t understand how there can be so much junk on television while other really interesting programmes get cancelled. Well, perhaps that junk is exactly what these 4,600 people, who represent the “TV consumer”, are watching.
The television advertising business moves billions of euros a year in Spain alone, and the data from the panellists (households with a meter installed) are known only to one company, the one that installs the audience “meter”. Each audience point for a channel is worth €7.6 million in advertising spending, so the advertising business is controlled by the viewing tastes of a minority.
Featured image: CDC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
