The Ardern government is determined to keep a dying industry afloat. But an unflinchingly loyal industry. Its “Public Interest Journalism Fund” is somewhat akin to a government of the 1900s pouring money into the horse and buggy industry, in return for plastering election posters on the horses’ arses.
Some of the biggest recipients of the government’s bribes largesse are TV and radio (add on their share of the Ardern government’s spiralling spending on advertising). Which are the very media Kiwis are abandoning in droves.
A huge cache of ratings data leaked to The Spinoff shows the immense scale of audience decline across linear television. The data come in the form of PUTS (People Using Television), and come from a client of ratings agency Nielsen. They show that audiences peaked around 2010, when the GFC was biting and internet connectivity and products were relatively poor, before setting out on an increasingly harsh decline.
It’s somewhat hilarious to see that these are the very people that Labor so assiduously pander to.
The youngest demographic is less than one third the scale of its peak, showing just how comprehensive the adoption of digital technology has been. But even for the 18-54 bracket, representing an older demographic, the decline has been steep, with less than half as many viewers as at the medium’s peak. Even 5+ has come back from an audience of over 700,000 around 2010 to less than 500,000 today. What makes the data even more eye-opening is that our overall population has risen by more than 25 per cent over the same span, from less than four million in 2000 to north of five million today.
What does this mean for the government and the legacy media?
This matters because linear television remains at the core of so much of our national communication strategy. The decline in audiences has not been matched by a corresponding decline in advertising revenue, which has largely stayed static. In recent years the government has become an increasingly prominent advertiser, and its campaigns remain most visible on television, despite the scale of audience loss. Similarly, our decentralised public broadcaster NZ On Air still shows a strong bias towards projects with linear television as the primary platform.
As the government prepares to merge TVNZ with RNZ, the shrinking audiences from linear television shows just how large the missing audiences are.
Just as the government is backing a dinosaur industry — with your taxes, remember — the industry itself is clinging to outdated models.
We watch a lot of on-demand now, too – TVNZ was rightly proud of 6.1 million weekly streams last year. Yet linear TV remains the form we spend the most time and money on, despite knowing little about how it is tracking.
The plunge in old-school media audience is following roughly similar curves across all age groups, but the most dramatic plunge has far and away been in the young adult demographic.
This is significant because 25-54 is the group most sought after by advertisers. It’s the one that funds our TV networks with its attention, and which is also the target for the largest chunk of our publicly funded media through NZ On Air.
NZ Herald
Once again, the Ardern government is throwing good money after bad, by the truckload.
Sure, that’s what governments do. This one just does it more than most.