Commentary
Gen Zers: How Much TV Will They Watch -- Along With Other Digital Platforms?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 3, 2022
Some might see it as a good sign that all TV groups still watch a lot of TV -- especially live TV.
A Horowitz Research October survey of Generation Z media types -- 18- to-24-year-olds -- shows that 45% still watch live TV regularly. This could give hope to those …
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, the problem with interpreting this kind of research is that a 22-year -old respondent probably means about one or two hours a day when he/she claims to watch TV "regularly" while a 70-year-old probably means about seven to eight hours a day. The only way to get at the truth is to ask repondents about a long list of shows individually---but this is beyond the scope of most online studies and would result in very low cooperation rates if attempted.
Any 'linear TV" programmer who seriously targets millennials is likely doomed to attain very small audiences because young adults simply don't devote as much time to TV from all sources than older ones. The younger folks have too much else on their agendas. Worse, even if you come up with a show that does pull in a fair amount of millennials, they are the first to move on to newer fads when your show becomes repetitive so you have a constantly leaking audience bucket to fill---it is usually a losing battle.