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Young Male Viewership Analysis (First 5 Weeks of 03/04 Primetime Season)

Even though cable's viewership growth among M18-34 has been minimal to date — basically coming to a halt, Broadcast has not been able to hold on to these core viewers with their slate of new programming as six out of the total seven nets experienced significant losses among Men 18-34 as M18-24 viewership fell about 227,000 viewers and M25-34 lost 309,000 viewers from same period a year ago. The press has been concentrating on M18-24 but its not just M18-24 that Broadcast is having a hard time holding on to - M25-34 are fleeing as well. But where are they going? Broadcast TV might start seeing even greater losses among M25-34 as the World Series games on Fox have come to a halt since they were the main appeal for the first couple of weeks in the new season.

• Overall, PUT levels for young men have experienced a slight decline from last year as M18-34 put % level fell about 2.4 percentage points and M18-24 declined about 2.7%.

• Ad-supported cable's viewership for the first five weeks of the 03/04 season has slowed down significantly among young men as M18-34 viewership grew only slightly thanks solely to M18-24 -up 18,000 viewers from year ago v. up 227,000 viewers when comparing 02/03 to 01/02. Please note that M18-34 viewership will differ slightly from the addition of M18-24 & M25-34 due to rounding.

• Broadcast is experiencing losses among both M18-24 & M25-34 but its greater loss is among Men aged 25-34 as overall viewership is down 309,000 v. year ago with this demo. It looks like the world series games really appealed to M25-34 as this demo experienced significant gains with Fox. In fact, Fox was the lone gainer but this might change as the network will start telecasting its new programming soon. Conversely to Broadcast, some of the M18-24 are heading to cable as ad supported cable is experiencing minimal gains with this demo but has remained on par with last year among M25-34 whereas it in the past it has experienced losses in the previous two years (02/03 to 01/02).

• When looking at audience composition of young men — cable experienced some minimal losses as M18-34 comp is slightly lower than it was last year but Broadcast's M18-34 composition has decreased almost six percentage points -mostly thanks to M25-34 making up less of the total P2+ pie.

So what's happening? There are various possibilities which may be impacting the loss of young men. They are: weighting of the sample — as more lighter TV viewers are being recruited in sample to better represent the population whereas in the past its has been mostly heavy viewers; young men watch less TV; increased use of DVDs, video games, etc.; Broadcast programming not appealing to young men this season; and as Baby Boomers continue to age and move into older age brackets, Generation X'ers (19-37 year olds) will start to replace them in these groups. In essence, the number of people in these age ranges are likely to go down, as a bigger group of people gets older and moves out of them and a smaller group of people moves in.

Download M18-34 Viewership Analysis Spreadsheet

NOTE: There are three tabs contained in the above spreadsheet.