Hasta La Creative!

As younger viewers continue to abandon ad-supported television for the profligate delights of streaming, their older counterparts have shown themselves to be more averse to ad breaks than ever before. Predictably, both trends have been doing a number on the networks’ stock of commercial ratings points.

According to Nielsen, broadcast C3 ratings in the fourth quarter dropped 11 percent versus the year-ago period, as ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox combined for an average primetime draw of just 7.02 million adults age 18-49, down from the 7.86 million members of the demo who watched the ads during the three terminal months of 2017. Comparisons to the fourth quarter of 2016 are even more off-putting, as the Big Four nets over the last two years have seen more than one-quarter (27 percent) of their demographically desirable viewers vanish into thin air.

When expressed as a decimal rating, the combined demo delivery at the four networks works out to a 5.4, which translates to a year-over-year loss of around 845,000 18-49-year-olds per night versus the earlier 6.1 rating. Over a two-year span, some 2.6 million members of the demo have dematerialized, a number which reflects the loss of more than two whole ratings points (2.1).

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