A new report by the Cable Advertising Bureau suggests that the notion of cord cutting among millennials, particularly women 18-24, is greatly exaggerated.
The report, which was created by the cable industry's customer facing trade association and culls data from Nielsen and other sources, reported that linear television's overall share of total video viewing hours grew from 84 percent to 88 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of last year.
And overall viewing hours declined over the same yearlong span, from 133 to 113, but traditional TV held a higher share of the overall reduced pie.
Yes, this report is saying that U.S. consumers are actually watching less online video. But the report cites comScore, which found that U.S. Internet users watched 11 percent less online video in March 2014 than they did in March 2013. However, these rankings don't do a great job of keeping track of the major shift currently occurring to mobile viewing platforms.
Overall, the report from the cable advertising group paints a counterintuitive picture of declining Internet use and a growing preference of cable TV to other platforms.
Young women are consuming more video over mobile devices, but are spending, on average, 15 percent less time each day online in front of a desktop or notebook computer, the CAB says.
Citing its own analysis of comScore data, the CAB also says women 18-24 prefer online destinations for cable TV networks over indigenous online platforms for various genres. For example, when they seek out news online, the CAB says women prefer visiting CNN.com over, say, Buzzfeed.
Meanwhile, citing Nielsen data, the CAB says young women have an overwhelming preference for cable programming relative to broadcast, watching, on average, 16.2 hours of cable each week compared to just 4.3 hours of broadcast.
For more:
- read this CAB report (PDF)
- read this Adweek story
Related links
CAB: Cable cleared $9.29B in upfront ad commitments
Nielsen: People watch just 17 of 189 available channels
Nielsen: TV is still leading in viewership