2005 Annual Report - Cable TV Audience

The On-Demand Viewer

The Pew Research Center's studies suggest that cable news has consolidated a core audience of viewers but that it is occasionally able to draw additional viewers who seek out news when significant events are happening. Those people could be described as "news on demand" viewers. Rather than routinely watching a TV news program at a given time of day, they tune in when events pique their interest.

The surveys suggest that this "news on demand" pattern is particularly true for younger viewers. Adults under age 30 who "regularly" watch television news are more likely to watch cable than the broadcast networks by 29% to 18%. This preference for cable among younger viewers is important. Rather than setting aside time to watch the network news at a specific hour -- what's known as "appointment television" -- younger adults are more likely to go to cable, which is available any time they choose to tune in. And looking more closely at those cable viewing habits, there is evidence of the same news on demand behavior. Younger cable viewers are more likely than other groups to only watch on occasion, presumably when something is happening, rather than as a regular habit. The plurality of young cable viewers, 37%, describe themselves as "occasional" viewers, the highest of any age group in that category. Moreover, it's been that way for quite some time.

The bulk of the cable news audience, however, is made up of older Americans, who in general consume more news than younger ones (with the exception of online news). Their responses are the mirror image of the younger group's -- they call themselves regular consumers of cable rather than occasional but ultimately prefer network. Among people over 65 years old, 46% are "regular" cable news viewers, but 57% are "regular" network news viewers.⁵

Regular TV News Viewers, Cable vs. Network

By age group, June 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "News Audiences Increasingly Politicized," June 6, 2004

Does Cable News Have Room To Grow?

The question for the future is whether cable's big growth years are over.

Media analyst Tom Wolzien of Sanford C. Bernstein, analyzing Nielsen data on 50 of the most-watched cable networks, noted that from 2000 to 2004 their cumulative share of the cable TV audience remained static. The growth in viewership has come in the acquisition of cable service by more and more households. Viewership remained flat among consumers who already had cable service throughout the period. Fox News in particular seems to have benefited from increased distribution.

In an interview with USA Today, Wolzien suggested that the cable networks are now "cannibalizing" from each other rather than winning viewers from broadcast. He predicted that for cable in general, barring better programming and more investment, the size of the audience would peak in 2009.⁶

Fox News's growth to date seems to represent both phenomena -- adding more cable systems and stealing viewers from its rivals. Consider that in 2002, the median prime-time cable audience was 2.37 million viewers, and 48% of it was tuned to Fox News. Two years later, the median primetime cable audience was only slightly more, 2.61 million viewers, but now 57% of it was watching Fox.

The overall audience did grow over those two years, slightly, but Fox's share grew even more, a sign of cannibalizing its cable rivals.⁷

In the same period, Fox gained more audience than CNN lost, a sign that some of that audience also came from growing distribution. Indeed, between 2000 and 2004 MSNBC extended its potential reach of new cable systems by almost 30 million cable subscribers, while Fox News added closer to 40 million. CNN, meanwhile, which was already carried on most cable systems, gained only 10 million more potential subscribers over those four years.