RATINGS: 24 hour news channels for April

As seen above, here are the audience shares for the 24 hour news channels on DStv. Historically, it was eNCA's Patrick Conroy that took the brag and posted this image, but now that he doesn't manage the channel anymore, the new channel head posted the above private image for everyone to see.

As always, eNCA continues to hold above half of the market share, meaning that out of every two people watching news on DStv, one is watching eNCA. Looking at the comparison table, we can see that eNCA was actually below 50% in the preceding motnh, which is something I don't recall seeing before.

Both ANN7 and SABC News Channel are slowly building an audience as both channels are up quite a bit from a year ago.

However, we can see that though SABC News Channel and ANN7 grew, this growth has not been coming at the expense of eNCA. Instead, the international news and business news channels are suffering instead with all of them down sharply from what they were doing late last year when interest in the American election was high.

What should be most concerning is the absolutely poor performance from local business news channels. When it comes to Al Jazeera or BBC World News, they are okay with having such low viewership because their channels are available all around the world on different platforms to make up for poor performance in one location.

However, neither CNBC Africa or Business Day TV has the same cushion to protect them: DStv viewership is all they have and when no one watches them on DStv, there is no one watching them anywhere in the world.