Now that the Cricket World Cup is over, how was the viewership impacted for various channels? Who gained and who lost the revenue battle. We, at TAM, decided to look at trends on both viewerships and advertising rupees. The exercise as such was simple… yet painstaking to put together. We put together the revenue shares versus the viewership shares for the 6 weeks of the World Cup (Feb 9th to March 23rd) and compared the trends to 6 weeks prior to the World Cup. The trends are quite interesting!

As seen in chart above, Mass Channels and Sports channels gained because of DD1, DD2 and MAX respectively in terms of attracting eyeballs. However, Regional Language Stations dropped dramatically from 42% to 30% share!

So how did the Revenue shares get impacted? Were Media Planners and Advertisers expecting this to happen? Did they change tactics due to the W-Cup? The answers to these questions come about in the next chart.

Regional Stations already having a disproportionately lower revenues vis-à-vis their viewership shares (16% vs 42%) slipped even lower to only 12% of all earnings during Cricket season!

The case with Hindi Movie channels is however curious. Their revenues dipped from 7% to a mere 4% even as Sports expectedly doubled from 5% to 10%, News Channels continued to gain revenues mopping up 14% and Mass Channels rose to 55%!

In summary, the chart below pinpoints the losers and the gainers amongst different genres of channels.

Finally to conclude, Regionals and Hindi Movie channels have some re-building to do as the W-Cup draws to a close. The other obvious question is on the News Channels. 2% Viewership attracts more than 10% revenues!!! When will the bubble burst? Will it really burst? Will the Iraq war take it up or will the spate of new channels kill the Golden Goose?

Irrespective of what happens in the marketplace, TAM will be there to study, analyse and report the same to you. Watch this space for more!

Atul Phadnis, director, S-Group, TAM Media Research
Note :-
1. TAM Viewership data used for Viewership Share.
2. TAM ADEX data used for Revenue Share.
3. Considered only common channels between ADEX & Peoplemeter system.
4. Though the rates in TAM ADEX are 'Peak Rates', the chart plots Channel Genre level share trends which will be broadly in the same direction as the actual revenue earnings by individual channels within the set considered above.

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