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Last week, Nielsen released findings on time-shifted viewing for October 1-December 30, 2018, and reported that, overall, time-shifted viewing (up to 35 days after live broadcast) contributed a 10% lift to its ratings among persons aged 2+, and a 14% lift among persons aged 18-49. The results were even more pronounced when the findings were broken out by genre, as follows:
While it’s no surprise that younger audiences embrace delayed viewing to a greater extent than the overall population, the differences between the two audiences can be “dramatic” indeed. It’s food for thought, especially given that people often continue to watch ads, even when viewing time-shifted programming.
While Netflix is available to about half of U.S. TV homes, and is considered by some to be the destroyer of linear TV among younger viewers, we should remember that a typical adult devotes only 20-25 minutes per day to Netflix fare, while Millennials, who are lighter TV viewers anyway, probably don’t exceed this norm by much.
So, what do Millennials watch?
YouGov conducts numerous online surveys that pose questions about all sorts of subjects, including TV shows, networks and entertainment personalities. We found a recent YouGov investigation along these lines to be most intriguing. When asked about TV networks, not surprisingly, Netflix came out on top, with 84% of Millennials citing it as “most popular.” However, many “pay TV” networks also made the cut with Millennials; as shown in Table I, Animal Planet, Nickelodeon, the National Geographic Channel and Cartoon Network rounded out the top five most popular networks, while Discovery, ABC, FX, the Weather Channel, Comedy Central, Fox and others also scored well. As a point of comparison, we also included Baby Boomers in this table, and while they were even more inclined to favor pay TV networks, Netflix still ranked 10th in their assessment (see Table I).
Even more revealing were YouGov’s findings on the most popular TV shows among Millennials and Boomers. Table II shows that much ballyhooed entries like HBO’s Game of Thrones and AMC’s The Walking Dead failed to make the top 20 among Millennials, who instead rated shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Ellen, The Big Bang Theory and even Law & Order: SVU as being more popular. As for Boomers, mostly games shows, law and order and PBS shows made up the top 20.
It must be noted that online polls of this nature do not necessarily jibe with much more precise, meterized ratings of specific shows on an episode-by-episode basis. For example, both Millennials and Boomers had several game shows in their top ranks, but shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune draw very small 18-34-year-old audiences relative to older adults. It is possible that the high rankings of such fare among Millennials here is due to their on-air longevity, and the respondents’ cumulative history of occasional viewing and general familiarity with the programs, rather than the likelihood of watching on a given day.
As for the other popular Millennial shows, it is interesting that a significant number of pay TV programs found a place on their top 20 list, although the means of accessing many may very well have been through streaming. Nevertheless, perhaps we should heed Nielsen’s repeated finding that Millennials—despite reducing their linear TV consumption over the past decade—still watch pay TV as often as they stream content. It may be that advertisers who have savvy media buyers can still reach Millennials via pay TV after all.
