Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio and Education – how are we doing?
James Purnell
Director, Radio & Education
We’ve got the latest data in about our audiences for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Children’s and if you’ve read my blog before you’ll know that for radio we’ve set ourselves a target of stabilising audiences who are in the 15–44 age bracket, because in recent years that number has been in decline.
So in the last quarter (Oct-Dec 2017) 55% of this age-group listened to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio. That’s down a smidge (1.2%) on the previous quarter but broadly stable.
Across all audiences more people were listening to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio than in the previous quarter with Radio 1’s Breakfast Show doing especially well.
But we shouldn’t forget Radio 1 is getting 1.95m views a day on YouTube and Vevo and a million views a month on its Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iPlayer channel.
In Children’s we’ve got the data in for December – we measure the number of parents with children under 6 for CBeebies and 6–12 year olds for CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ.
On TV CBeebies did a little bit better than November (+1.6%) but is slightly down year on year. And although CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ claimed the top 5 most-viewed TV programmes viewing was down 5% compared to the previous year. Traffic to the CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ website was more or less stable.
Our online study service Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Bitesize continues to make a real difference to young learners with 82% of users saying it has helped them to understand their schoolwork or homework more and 58% of GCSE users saying it helped them to achieve better grades in their GCSEs. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Food had a great quarter – with use up across a range of metrics.
There aren’t any surprises in these numbers – gradual linear decline coupled with gradual digital growth.
The reach of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’s TV and Radio services is measured by people listening live and the success of those services is often judged by those measurements.
And don’t get me wrong, we celebrate when the linear numbers go up as they did with Nick Grimshaw’s Breakfast Show.
But if we really want to understand the true value of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ then we need to take account of and talk about how audiences consume and interact with content across our services, both inside and outside the linear schedules; downloading and streaming.
That’s why we want to get all our audiences signing in to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID – the more we know about what they enjoy when, the better we can offer everyone a personalised service.
And it’s why we’re developing a new measurement system that will capture and compare all the ways in which our audiences consume, across linear, on-demand and online. We’ll have more to say about it later this year.
James Purnell is Director, Radio & Education