Nielsen released its Total Audience Report for Q4 2016 this morning, and it’s chock full of notable insights concerning news consumption, not just via TV, but radio and smartphone/digital as well.
As one might expect, overall news consumption is up year-over-year–up 18 percent, in fact–and according to Nielsen’s svp of audience insights Glenn Enoch, “2017 is starting with even more news viewing/listening/reading than the 2016 average.”
Here some of Nielsen’s main takeaways from the Q4 report:
- Overall, adults 18+ spent over 5 billion minutes consuming news in the average week in 2016 — an +18 percent increase from the prior year.
- Adult news consumers spent 6 hours, 28 minutes per week tuning in to national cable TV news in 2016 — up nearly an hour-and-a-half from 2015 and 1 hour 45 minutes from the 2012 election cycle.
- National TV news, PC news, and radio news represented a larger share of total consumption from the prior year while local TV news was virtually flat.
When it comes to weekly news consumption in Q4 ’16, here’s the breakdown by source:
In terms of age demo, Nielsen found older news consumers are increasingly tuning to TV news each week over other sources. Younger news consumers, specifically Adults 18-34, increasingly turned to digital news sources in 2016, but they’re still spending more time with radio and TV news each week.
The report also looked at news consumption by race and ethnicity. African-American adults spent the most time with national and local broadcast TV news, while Whites were the heaviest listeners when it came to radio news. Additionally, Hispanic and Asian Americans seemed to rely less on TV news sources than other groups.