The latest media monitoring survey conducted by GeoPoll indicates that while Citizen TV is still the most-watched television station, it has been losing viewers over the years to other media houses.
In the report released on Tuesday, September 17, the pollster estimated the number of viewers the top four stations (Citizen TV, KTN Home, NTV, KTN News) had.
"We first examined daily audience share for the 7pm – 8pm time block from July to August 31, 2019. This time is when many of the major broadcasters air their primetime news shows," the report reads.
"We find that Citizen leads during this time, when they air the news show ‘Citizen Nipashe,’ and ‘Nipashe Wikendi’ with an average share of 30.6 percent across all days of the week, however, we observe differences in viewership based on day of the week, with Monday at 7 p.m. having the highest share, at 33%, and Saturday having the lowest share of viewership," Geopoll reported.
KTN Home and NTV are the second and third most popular stations from 7pm – 8pm, with average shares of 11% and 9.7% respectively.
However, KTN News has a 7.6% share, therefore the two KTN channels combined have 18.8% audience share during this time.
Unlike Citizen TV, KTN Home’s audience share stayed relatively consistent throughout the week in July and August 2019, with their highest shares on Friday evenings, at 13% on Friday at 7 p.m. NTV’s peak share during this time block came at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays.
In a 2015 report released by the same media monitoring pollster, Citizen TV held a commanding lead with 43% with KTN following with 17% and NTV closing the top thee with 12%.
After the February 2015 migration into digital transmission, several alternative TV channels were launched with the most successful ones offering bespoke vernacular content. The Standard Group also launched KTN's sister station KTN News the same year with the Royal Media Service Limited, the company that owns Citizen TV, unveiling Inooro TV later that year.
While the statistics of these alternative broadcasters were not included in the report, the fact that Citizen TV's market share has dropped by more than 10 percentage points since the digital migration, is an indication of the potency of newer players in the broadcast market.
