RATINGS: DStv news channels for 4-10 July

Thanks to Haranth Ghosh of ANN7, we get the below glimpse into what the average viewership is like for DStv's news channels, even if its only for a few days :


Though we had previously seen audience share, this is the first time we get to see the actual viewership figures.

One major criticism that I have to mention is that the measurement is done out of sync with the domestic news channels (and by far the largest news channels): The domestic news channels run from 6am to midnight, whilst this measurement is from 5am-11pm, leaving an hour of premiering content out, but including repeat content.

Just to quickly explain the graph: the first column describes the channel's total audience share when compared to every tv channel in the country. The obvious reason why these figures are so small is because these news channels are available in about 5 million homes (I will analyse this figure in the next paragraph), most of which has over 60 tv channels, whereas a major channel like SABC1 is available in excess of 20 million homes (I do not have the actual figure, but its much higher than 20 million), most of which only has 5 tv channels (the three SABC channels, eTV and the community channel in that area).
The next column is the actual viewership. A bit of math reveals the coutry's average amount of tv viewers across all channels is just under 17 million viewers at a given time, on average.
The final column is the percentage of audience share among news channels only.

From the above we can see that eNCA continues to average over 50% of the market share (Recently revealed stats show its the 6th most watched channel on all of DStv). What makes this figure even more impressive is that eNCA is available in only about 2.5 million households compared to 5 million for SABC News Channel and ANN7. In Naspers' (DStv's parent company) recent results, it showed that roughly 50% of DStv subscribers are collectively on DStv Premium, Compact and Extra, equating to about 2.5 million viewers and eNCA is available only on these bouquets, compared to all bouquets for the other domestic news channels.

The race to second place is heating up with SABC News Channels' viewership share seemingly stagnating while ANN7 is now on its heels.

For some odd reason, British news channel, Sky News, is in a close fourth place, whilst CNN has a marginal lead among international channels.

These viewership figures will get more interesting as the local elections approach.

[NOTE: These viewership figures include those watching on DStv in South Africa only. It excludes eNCA's viewers in the rest of Southern Africa and online, SABC News Channel's viewership in the rest of the continent, and ANN7's online viewership]