Despite the plethora of platforms on which to watch content, multiscreen TV continues to grab more of American viewers’ attention than all the others combined, according to a new report from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.
Taking a comparative look at the attention consumers give to multiscreen TV, Google/YouTube, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook, the CAB found that ad-supported TV content garners 80% of consumer attention. That’s 80% of 175 hours the average person spends per month watching TV and consuming content (search, social, mobile, e-mail and video) on the four Web portals and Facebook.
Television outpaces YouTube by a wide margin among all adults and among younger adults ages 18-24, the CAB said. In a side-by-side comparison, ad-supported TV garnered 95% of all users’ time vs. YouTube’s 5% while TV took 88% percent of younger adults’ time vs. YouTube’s 12%.
The CAB combined a number of industry-standard metrics, including Nielsen ratings and comScore data from Q4 2014, to create the report, “Get Real: Video Advertising 2015.”
Television websites either lead or occupy multiple spots in the “top 5” across the major online content genres: news, sports, food, kids, weather, comedy, gaming, home, music and entertainment. TV content also fuels top-ranked tablet apps in the 11 largest content categories, the CAB said.
To look at performance in terms of impressions, the CAB drilled down to specific shows and networks compared against YouTube. For September of 2014, it found, the 2,367.6 million monthly impressions created by one TV series — in this case, HGTV’s Property Brothers — equaled those of YouTube’s top 10 channels combined, at 2,355.4 million.
“Smart marketers will clarify their definition of Internet video as an extension of a Multiscreen TV buy,” Sean Cunningham, CAB’s CEO, said. “Using video to sell more stuff isn’t about how many places you can technically ‘reach’ people for one to two seconds, and it’s not about how many splintered impressions you can aggregate. It’s about how much time and attention you can amass with audiences committed to the same content.”
