The people who watch baseball are old and getting older, but so are the viewers of most other sports. The average age of a television viewer of baseball is 57, up from 52 in the year 2000:
Don’t laugh, football fans, because it isn’t as if your sport is looking much better. While the average NFL viewer is 50, only 9% of the NFL’s audience is kids under 18. Blame devices and attention spans all you’d like, but NFL viewership dropped by 8% on average last year, with Sunday and Monday night games down 10% to 12%.
For the NFL, that average age is up six years since 2000. Hockey is even worse, with the average age at 33 in 2000, 49 years old today.
I’m guessing this is part demographics, part technology upheaval. There were simply a lot more people born in the early 1960s (the end of the baby boom) than in the 1970s. In other words, given the same rate of viewership per age, the center is going to be older when aggregated. On top of that, people do not watch TV the same way anymore. I don’t know how watching baseball on a streaming device is captured by television ratings. I may watch a MASN broadcast, for example, but I don’t see the MASN ads nor the MASN cut ins. It’s not the same television experience.
Still, this leaves me less worried about the sport. Maybe old people like me just have more time to watch.
Hat tip, Marginal Revolution.
from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2Pw8pgi
No comments:
Post a Comment