Study reveals surprising diversity among public TV viewership

[Commentary] Though public television has long labored under the onus that its audience largely consists of older, upscale white viewers, our recent study of cumulative viewing of local stations demonstrates that this criticism is not warranted. The 2015 study, Know and Grow, was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and powered by new Nielsen software that allowed us to look at how viewers in 56 metered markets watch television on a daily basis. It revealed a very diverse audience for Public TV stations in those markets, both in terms of age of the viewers and their ethnicity. In one community, minority viewers watch more public television than do whites. As the study’s title suggests, we designed the research to deliver insights about stations’ viewership that could then be used to help them grow their audiences.

The biggest surprise from our early findings was the sizable cumulative audience (cumes) of minority viewers of some stations. For example, in Las Vegas (NV) 25 percent of the Hispanic households in the market were in the weekly household cume of Vegas PBS, while the Hispanic monthly cume was 44 percent.

[David and Judith LeRoy are co-founders of TRAC Media Services, a research company that provides audience analysis and programming services for public TV stations. Craig Reed is TRAC’s executive director]