The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has published an extensive Audience Measurement and Industry Report for Q2 2019-2020. The numbers are for broadcasting, which cuts through various channels such as radio and TV as a means for education, information, and entertainment. The data was collected and made sense of for the period between October and December 2019.
For housekeeping reasons, the CA gathered the numbers with the help of the Kenya Audience Research Foundation (KARF) based on the following models: fixed panel target (3000 daily sample of Kenyans aged 15 years and above), single data sourcing for TV, radio, online data, and print; face to face recruitment and computer-aided telephone interviews, to mention a few.
The first obvious audience measurement channels were radio, TV, newspapers, magazine and online incidence.
The numbers reveal an interesting period at the time of the investigation.
By looking at the charts published by the CA, radio has the widest reach with the following incidences for October, November and August 2019, respectively: 56.0%, 62.2% and 54.8%.
Television incidences hit the following percentages for the same months: 42.1%, 49.7% and 43.8%.
The third platform in terms of reach was online incidences at 21.4%, 26.4% and 22.8%, for the same months.
Newspapers came in fourth with 6.7%, 8.2% and 6.6%.
Lastly was magazine incidence at 0.1%, 0.0% and 0.0%.
The incidences for newspapers and magazines are especially bad, perhaps due to people seeking online platforms to read about their news items and lifestyle trends.
The decline noticed in December was associated to people travelling for holidays, mostly to upcountry where there is limited access to media platforms.
In Q1 during the same financial year, the percentage of people using free to air channels was over 90 percent, with only 5.4% using pay TV. The numbers did not change in Q2 at 94.7% for free to air and 5.3% for pay TV.
Free to air channels audience is even higher in rural areas at 95.4%. only 6.1% of urban dwellers use pay TV.
These are interesting trends that we will be examining as we go through the report slowly.
