CBC TV has an audience crisis, according to the most recent data released by CBC. CBC is required by the government to report on its financial and audience performance on a quarterly basis. Quarterly reporting began in 2011-12. Reports are issued for the first three quarters of the year and the annual report presents results for the full year.
To its credit CBC is revealing more information about its performance than it has in recent years. Once upon a time CBC was transparent about its finances and its audiences but competition today has meant smaller audiences, at least in TV, and there has been less for the Corporation to boast about and more to be defensive about.
The metrics CBC uses to measure performance run the gamut from content percentages to revenues obtained from advertising and other sources. To measure audience performance CBC uses audience ‘share’, ‘listening/viewing hours’, ‘average minute audience’, ‘subscriber counts’, ‘unique visitors’ and opinion scores. One needs to be an expert in audience measurement to work their way through this maze of information. I doubt that many CBC Board members or senior managers understand or could explain it all.
Moreover, the measures are not applied uniformly across all CBC services. The main TV services are measured by share, the smaller specialty TV channels by subscriber counts (not an audience measure), radio morning shows and supper hour TV programs by weekly listening/viewing hours, the web sites by monthly visitors, etc. English and French services also differ in the metrics used for similar services.
CBC, again to its credit, attempts to measure public reaction to its services rather than rely strictly on measures of audience size or ratings. Ratings data are provided by independent third-party ratings organizations but to measure public reaction CBC commissions its own surveys. This, of course, means the surveys could be perceived as biased. Little information is provided about these custom surveys. We are assured that the sample of respondents results in “a very small margin of error.” Survey results are provided in each quarterly report as shown in the table below, showing the agreement scores (out of 10) for various traits of CBC radio and TV as a whole:
In the quarterly reports differences in the opinion scores of .1, .2 or .3 in these or similar traits are described as indicating a trend. For example the 2011-12 third quarter report claims: “Results…suggest that Anglophones are responding positively to the initiatives that have been announced or introduced since the launch of Strategy 2015. Scores for each aspect of the guiding principles were higher in November 2011 than in November 2010.”
But these small differences in the scores, some of which turned negative by the third quarter of 2012-13 as shown above, are probably not statistically significant. More importantly, is this the correct way to measure public reaction to CBC services? Asking Canadians whether CBC radio, TV and web services as a whole are informative, enlightening or entertaining is almost certainly going to elicit a positive average score. Survey researchers know this. CBC offers many services and some people will be answering for CBC radio, some for CBC TV, some for CBC News Network, some for their favourite CBC shows or personalities or cbc.ca, etc. Besides, ask the same question of CTV or TVA and you will probably receive similar scores. So what is the purpose of asking questions that fail to capture year-to-year changes and that do not differentiate between CBC services or other broadcasters? CBC needs to rethink how it measures public reaction.
The various measures of audience size used by CBC are shown in the table below, taken from the most recent quarterly report for 2012-13:
To measure the size of the audience of cbc.ca, a third-party estimate of unique monthly visitors is used. The most recent number is 6.1 million monthly visitors, slightly below the target of 6.5 million visitors. Previous quarterly reports broke down this number to distinguish between CBC online news, sports and entertainment but this was for some reason “discontinued.” The monthly visitor or reach number seems impressive at first glance but if one were to compare this to other web sites, it would become apparent that hundreds of sites generate a large audience reach over the course of a month. To be counted one need only visit a site for as little as a few minutes in a month. A more telling number would be the audience share of time spent browsing the internet. However, because the net has thousands of web sites all competing for audience, cbc.ca has a small share of browsing time, not something web sites want to divulge.
To measure the size of the CBC radio audience, a third-party estimate of audience share is employed. The most recent share for CBC radio is reported as 15.3%, a full share point ahead of the target for the year. CBC radio, despite internal and external budget cuts remains strong. Unfortunately, Radio 1 and Radio 2 are not broken out separately, so we don’t know if one is trending higher and the other lower.
Without explanation, CBC employs a different audience metric for Radio 1 morning shows, reverting to weekly listening hours. Since share is simply the percentage of listening hours of CBC compared to time listening to all radio stations, it would be simpler to use share here as well. CBC French radio in the same report uses share. However, millions of hours sounds more impressive. The silver lining: listening hours allows one to compare to the viewing hours of CBC TV’s supper hour programs, which, interestingly, are only half the size of the radio morning shows. The radio morning shows and the supper hour TV news programs are the most important local programming offered by CBC. (Note to CBC researchers: the footnote sourcing the radio listening hours is incorrect.)
The metric that shows the most change in the latest quarterly report is the audience share of CBC TV.
The prime time share of CBC TV is reported as 5.3% at the mid-point of the TV season. This is a loss of over 40% compared to the 9.3% share in 2010-11. The report comments on this decline: “For CBC Television, reduced programming as a result of the funding decreases announced in Federal Budget 2012, the absence of professional hockey due to the NHL labour disruption and the phasing-out of the LPIF contributions had significant programming and revenue implications on our conventional and digital platforms. CBC Television’s share performance fell from the prior year’s results and is trending below target.” Not mentioned is that 2012-13 also marked the first year without U.S.
The first and presumably most important factor used to explain CBC TV audience losses, cuts in the federal funding, also affected other CBC services but they managed to exceed or come close to targets. Worth noting: CBC radio’s share is now three times larger than the audience share of CBC TV.
If the share of CBC TV was just over 5% in prime time, it is below 5% on a 24 hour basis; CBC daytime schedules have traditionally performed poorly compared to CBC’s prime time. Making matters worse is that the audience to about half the U.S. TV stations available in Canada
There has been some public debate about whether or not CBC is in crisis. The CBC’s latest report confirms that many programs on the main TV service, despite efforts to be more “popular,” have fallen to audience levels not much greater than many specialty channels. Those who deny the crisis fail to realize that Canadians prefer Duck Dynasty to most CBC shows, including the national news. The most important and costly CBC service has an audience crisis and CBC needs to respond to it. Is it time to rethink the role of CBC TV?
It's time that the Government gets out of a taxpayer funded broadcaster.
ReplyDeleteEnd any and all funding to the CBC immediately, and sell off the assets.
ReplyDeleteSo much for Stursberg's spin on the ratings.
ReplyDeleteTime to end Sun News
ReplyDeleteSilly Leftist... it's a private company!
DeleteAs of today Feb 13th 2015, SUN News Network is no more... gone the way of the Dodo.
DeleteCouldn't compete in the 'free market'...
What free market? The only ones to get anything free is the CBC....
DeleteGovernment cuts can't be blamed for ratings decline. CTV and Global get ZERO direct subsidies from taxpayers and still kick CBC's butt. CBC still gets over $1 billion per year in direct subsidies and can't compete. When you rely on the government you have no incentive to work hard and succeed. THAT is why CBC ratings are so pathetic.
ReplyDeleteexactly, the CBC has an unfair advantage, using YOUR Canadian tax dollars and mine against other CANADIAN-CONTENT networks
DeleteI think this reveals more about your lack of understanding of what every media outlet faces than anything - no website does this because it's IMPOSSIBLE - "A more telling number would be the audience share of time spent browsing the internet. However, because the net has thousands of web sites all competing for audience, cbc.ca has a small share of browsing time, not something web sites want to divulge."
ReplyDeleteExcellent post and research. I agree about the 'telling number' mentioned above, I thought that sentence was a typo, because its really not at all useful anyway.
ReplyDeleteCBC should really be regarded completely separate. CTV and Global kick CBC's butt because they simply buy US programming. That adds NOTHING to canada's economy or public debate. I don't discount the value of entertainment completely, but have to wonder whether "Republic of Doyle" actually adds much to the 'values' of Newfoundland.
As for the web, its easier to comment on stories at the Globe and Mail than the CBC. By now I've probably had DOZENS of comments which simply do not show up and state 'content disabled' even though they contain no foul language or insults. Stories about sex offenders never allow comments at all, while stories about natives let the bigots have full reign.
CBC shouldn't even be compared to other stations, they should be rated according to how much legislation their stories affect, how much more active listeners become in public life, and things like that. Its embarassing that the small province I come from has had more legislation affected by the work of one blogger than all of the CBC. In New Brunswick for some bizarre reason more emphasis is put on what one reporter 'predicts' gas prices to do that week than anything else. Although to be fair, its hardly CBC's fault that virtually nobody pays attention to their weekly political roundups-but media still hasn't caught up to the fact that the public no longer sees political parties and elections as the representatives of political action. Most of the public simply takes it as a given that such people are lying whenever they speak anyway-which makes it hard to have political discussions.
The question is whether it is better to have fluff pieces as entertainment to a large group of people, or stuff of quality for smaller groups. There is plenty of fluff to go around, so I agree with others that IF that is CBC's aim, then we simply don't need it. For the other though, we need that very much.
What you say MAY have been true in the past, but you can get more Canadian Content off the Internet since the new milennium. The CBC is a tarpit of wasteful, entitled, overpaid managers at this point. Most Canadians would prefer a different "donation" model than the highway robbery of our taxes to support it's pitiful content.
DeleteI agree 100%! Why should my family pay over $100 per year in taxes for a chanel that we never watch! Their news reporting is far from balanced. If the cbc were still relevant to Canadians, it could compete in the open market without being propped up by a billion taxpayers dollars every year!
DeleteI'd like to see the CBC set up as a self sustaining non-profit that ran on the donations of it's supporters. Let them freely state their opinions without political interference from the Government of the day and sink or swim on their own. They served an important function for many years but now the internet and satellite TV allow almost all Canadians to be connected and informed from sources of their choice. Sadly CBC tv has become a Toronto-centric entity that has little relevance to most Canadians outside the GTA.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see an end to public funding of the CBC. They have become a left wing advocacy group, taking public money to promote only the left side of the political spectrum even though conservative tax payers are forced to contribute to it. They rose to a position of power during the Trudeau years when the huge increase in public funding to the CBC was initiated and most of the aging political commentators at the CBC owe their careers to the Liberals. That public funding now stands at over $1 Billion per year - more than the worst case scenario of the F-35 funding.
ReplyDeleteAdd to the Liberal legacy of the modern CBC the fact that most employees of the CBC are members of public sector-style unions. Just about everyone from the camera men to the writers to the on-air personalities belong to a union. Only Upper Management and "Guest Commentators" are exempt from mandatory union membership. Thus the organization as a whole has a self interest in opposing any political party which advocates cuts in government spending or limitation of public sector union power. No wonder that the CBC has a left wing bias.
Ending public funding of the CBC has two main benefits:
The first one is self explanatory - we save $1 Billion per year.
Second and more important than the savings is the leveling of the political landscape where the $1 Billion per year given to the CBC is tantamount to giving $1 Billion per year to the Public Relations and Advertising budget of the Liberal Party of Canada. This gives the Liberals an unfair advantage and is thus a threat to true democracy.
To those that say, that ending public funding of the CBC is just a Conservative attempt to snuff out opposing political views, I say this: I'm not opposed to people with different views having an opportunity to express their opinions. I'm just opposed to being forced to pay for people expressing views I disagree with.
I was an ardent CBC fan in the 60's, 70's and 80's. However the lack of worthwhile "Canadian Content", the Progressive Bias in reporting, and the availability of the same via the INTERNET makes the CBC a highly over-rated, parasitic behemoth employing "entitlement mentality sycophants". The sooner we privatize the beast, make its bloated managers become truly competetive in the world market, the better for taxpayers who never use its services anymore. Sell the assets to the highest bidder and put the money back in our Canadian coffers. The sooner the better.
ReplyDelete