• BusinessWeek, Sunday, October 25, 2009 9:35 PM

At CBS it's the same old, same old. With multiple sitcoms, police procedurals and healthy ratings it's the very definition of Old Media. "They've proven anyone wrong who thought that no matter what a network did, their audiences would continue to erode," says Andrew Donchin, an executive at Carat North America.

Now the interesting part: While CBS attracts older viewers than other networks (its average age is 55) its ability to attract large audiences is prompting advertisers, long obsessed with young viewers, to give the network a second look. CBS' large audiences have helped it to charge an additional 10% or more for 30-second ads compared to earlier this year. As a result, CBS will generate $4.7 billion in advertising revenues this year, allowing it to sneak past NBC.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves likes to called advertisers' fixation on young viewers simplistic. Now, with the under-50 set hurting from the Great Recession, his theory makes more sense. "Someone needs to show me where an 18-year-old consumer buys more than a 50-year-old," he says. The question for CBS is what will happen to its boomer-friendly advertisers after the downturn.

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