Disintermediation Is Here: Cable TV Suffers Huge 2010 Audience Losses - Television Is Soooo 20th Century

A show of hands please: how many saw the film of the Japanese earthquake destruction on TV and how many on iPhone, Blackberry, laptop etc?

Those numbers are not yet in, but they will be and when they are, it is safe to assume they will confirm recent data. Cable TV in the US is losing its audience and the smart money says it has, to use Mark Twain's melifluous phrase, 'lit out for the territory,' that being the 'net.

This has staggering implications for how we form opinions, make political decisions (and are influenced to do same), advertise and buy the stuff we are encouraged to buy. We will have to see if this is, indeed, a trend or simply a data point reflective of hard economic times. The betting is its the former and that the trend line sharpens its trajectory.

Caroline Shin has the numbers on Business Insider:


"Has the influence of cable news peaked?

All four cable networks saw their prime-time audiences fall in 2010, according to the 2011 State of the News Media study conducted by the PEW Project for Excellence in Journalism.

MSNBC, Fox, HLN, and CNN lost between 39,000 and 331,000 viewers as the fourth most popular platform for news showed signs of becoming less important.

Fox News lost a whopping 11%, but that's not even the worst performance.

In 2010, about 42 million different people watched CNN for at least an hour a month. That was more than Fox’s 41 million and MSNBC’s 37 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The median prime-time viewership at the three channels together dropped 16% to an average of 3.2 million viewers.

MSNBC experienced the mildest drop in audience, falling 5% to 747,000 in prime time. That was of loss of 39,000 viewers.

HLN lost 17% of its prime-time viewers, falling to an average of 434,000 after a loss of 89,000 people.

The prime-time audience at Fox fell 11% to a median viewership of 1.9 million. It lost 234,000 viewers.

CNN saw the most severe fall-off. Median prime-time viewership plunged 37% in 2010 to 564,000 viewers. It lost 331,000 viewers.

The same pattern occurred during daytime hours. Daytime audience for cable news fell 12%, as a median figure of 1.9 million people watched on any typical day.