Industry | 2009.12.24
TV ad viewing 'up 30% since 2000'
Increasing viewing from personal video recorders such as Sky+ enough to wipe-out ad-skipping effect, research finds
The average UK TV viewer sees more than 40 TV ads a day, 30% more than in 2000 – depsite the advent of advert-skipping technology such as Sky+.
The massive proliferation of channels over the past decade and an increase in the time spent viewing commercial television has fuelled the increase, despite the rise of personal video recorders which allow programmes to be recorded and ads skipped.
In 2000 the average UK viewer watched 33 ads a day, according to research from the TV marketing body Thinkbox, but the number has now risen to 43. A total of 2.45bn adverts are seen by UK viewers each day.
One reason for this is that the amount of viewing of commercial TV, that is non-BBC channels, has risen by five minutes per day in the last decade to an average of 2.37 hours. In addition the rise of digital TV has meant that the number of channels has doubled - from 252 channels in 2000 to 495 today.
It seems that so far the rise of personal video recorders, such as Sky+, has not resulted in the widely expected phenomenon of mass ad skipping. The popularity of PVRs means there is 17% more TV watched in those households.
Thinkbox reckons that while ads are skipped in some households, PVR households are still watching 2% more commercials as a result of increased overall viewing.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/24/tv-ad-viewing-up
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1523
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1514