The Internet is Bigger than Cable
Published 4 years, 9 months ago in marketing + advertising, publishing + content, sales and sellingQuoting Jeff Jarvis in full (because the information is that important to me:
The Internet is now bigger than cable, according to eMarketer (via MediaPost and LostRemote).
…eMarketer now estimates U.S. household Internet penetration is about 67.9 percent. That compares with a 65.8 percent U.S. household penetration level for cable, according to an eMarketer analysis of Nielsen Media Research and U.S. Census data.
More significantly, Ramsey noted that while cable TV penetration has essentially been flat at about 66 percent of U.S. households, online penetration continues to expand….
ìWow,î said Jes Santoro, vice president-director of integrated media at Earthquake Media, a media shop that buys traditional and online media, upon learning of the online penetration milestone from MediaDailyNews. ìI think it is very significant. But itís symbolic as well.î
ìItís symbolic because it speaks to peopleís media consumption habits,î he explained. ìThink about cable, you kind of have to have it to have it to get TV reception. Itís almost like a utility. But with the Internet, people go out and get it because they want to use the Internet.î
eMarketerís Ramsey agreed, noting that it was similar household penetration milestones that first got cable TV on the map with Madison Avenue during various junctures in cableís history.Oh, but that’s not the half of it. They’re only counting homes and every single Internet business I know (even Nick Denton’s work-unsafe Fleshbot) sees its prime time at midday, during work, where almost anyone sitting at a desk now has high-speed Internet access.
So the penetration is higher than the numbers above indicate. And the usage is higher.
Internet will get greater mindshare and greater share of the audience’s attention because cable and TV and radio can’t reach them at work, but the Internet can.
Let’s repeat that again: The Internet is bigger than cable TV. And so the Internet should be getting a much bigger share of advertising dollars.
Alas, though… ‘the internet’ is too fragmented to aggregate for media buyers the way cable is aggregated in most markets… Even with cable there are only 300 channels or so for advertisers to split their dollars amongst…
Also see: John Battelle’s SearchBlog and MarketingWonk.
2 Responses to “The Internet is Bigger than Cable”
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Bogus argument. 15 percent of homes have satellite TV. Add it in and it’s 80 percent penetration vs. 68 percent. It’s a nice story, but advertisers tend not to advertise on “cable,” but on TV channels… that are carried on both cable and satellite.
Someone read a bad metric, didn’t use any common sense, and made a stupid extrapolation.
Jason…
Yes, but that 68% doesn’t include all of the people that surf the web from the office (which I’m doing right now). Most people don’t watch any TV between 8am and 5pm … at least not while they’re in the office. I think the fact that the internet is in so many homes is an important fact… I wonder if we compared how many offices the internet is in to how many offices cable is in if that’s help shed some light on the real reach of the internet as a whole?
I agree, just because the internet is available to people doesn’t mean that a lot more money will flow into the advertising revenues of most media companies, mainly because it’s sooo hard to aggregate all of that ‘internet’ traffic into a few sellable channels… which is what’ll be required to get the big dollar advertisers using it to a large degree.
They want ‘reach and frequency’ and the internet as a whole still doesn’t deliver that, unless people buy a whole lot of sites… and that’s still not happening because the dollars are still all stuck in other broadcast media…