TV is changing. Or rather, the way of enjoying television content is changing, but in our country “traditional” linear television remains by far the mass media par excellence. According to the 55th Censis 2021 Report, digital terrestrial TV has a penetration of 87.9% compared to 41.9% of Internet TV and 41.6% of satellite TV, while mobile TV stands at 33.4%. And, according to the Global Web Index data, Italians spend an average of 2 hours and 16 minutes a day watching traditional TV and 1 hour and 4 minutes instead of watching TV online.
In recent months, the debate on metrics has become more and more lively, and in fact Auditel would be ready to kick off the single viewing figures for TV, PC, smartphone and tablet from the end of March. While waiting for this to happen, hoping that it will be as soon as possible, after analyzing the television audience ratings in 2021 compared to 2020, thanks to Audiweb data we have reconstructed the online audience of the broadcasters in our country of which the survey institute makes available, precisely, the data.
Compared to the total digital audience on the average day, which in January 2022 was just over 37 million users on the average day, the online audience of the various television websites is a relatively small share overall, amounting to approximately 4.2 million. of users on the average day, equal to 11.3% of the total. A penetration that is far lower than that of online news. Suffice it to say that Repubblica alone, again in January of this year, reached just under 3.2 million users on an average day.
In the current state of affairs, the attractiveness of TV websites is therefore modest despite the fact that they have a great variety of contents capable of attracting people. It is clear that there must be a rethinking of online presence strategies by broadcasters.At seeing the data, it seems that the launch at the end of 2021 of RaiNews, as a digital aggregator of all Rai information, gives impetus in this sense, and in fact the The news portal of the state broadcaster is the one that records the greatest growth both compared to January 2021 and compared to the previous month, in December 2021. Therefore, if the relaunch of RaiNews seems to have positive effects, overall the audience of the various sites of Mediaset is clearly superior to that of Rai. On average more than double.
Discovery Plus (now Discovery +) also has little attraction. If these are the numbers, Discovery’s streaming platform certainly doesn’t look like a success. Maybe the idea of making content available only on two Sky channels and on Dazn wasn’t exactly right, let’s say. And in fact it is news these days that Discovery wants to remodel the streaming, merging Discovery + with Hbo Max. And the RaiSport audience cries out for revenge, very far from that of Sport Mediaset. Despite a great wealth of sports content, the audience is really at a minimum. Rai has a lot to work on this.
As the infographic shows, if all the sites for which data are available are growing compared to December 2021, compared to January 2021 only three out of nine do not have a negative trend. Not exactly a hit, let’s say.
