Election Night in the United States.
This is the season where news networks flourish. I guess we could say this is the Super Bowl for these entities.
It is the time when tens of millions are tuning in. This becomes a global situation since interest spreads beyond the border of the United States.
Unfortunately for the traditional media outlets, the picture was not rosy. Could we be witnessing the acceleration of the fragmentation of media?
I think so.
This is an ongoing process that moves beyond just news. In fact, it is part of the entire entertainment spectrum. That said, this epitomizes what is taking place.
News Networks Witnessing The Same Trend
Legacy media is suffering blows on all sides. There is very little working.
A Presidential Election is usually a proven way to get people tuning in. This would make sense in an environment where things are so decisive. On top of this, many of the pollsters promoted this as a close election.
You would think the numbers went through the roof.
For the household names, this was not the case.
The 2024 election results were watched by more than 42 million people on cable news alone across the United States, according to figures released by Nielsen.
For contrast, this is what we saw in the past two election.
Ratings dropped across the board for this election by 25 percent compared to the 2020 election, when Nielsen recorded 56.9 million viewers, in itself a drop from 2016, which saw 71 million.
In 8 years, the viewership dropped from 71 million to 42 million. That is a huge loss.
Where did these people go? Some of them were showing up online. As with many things, here is where a shift is taking place.
Wile network ratings for Election Night declined significantly compared to 2020, YouTube was the go-to spot for live election news for millions of people.
Here are the key stats: Nearly 84 million hours of live election content was streamed on Tuesday, according to Streamcharts, a Ukraine-based streaming data company. And YouTube accounted for the vast majority of those hours, with 80.6%, or 60.7 million hours, of those hours being watched on the Google-owned streaming platform. (The U.S. accounted for most [72.3%] of those 84 million hours streamed overall.)
We cannot deny more people are turning to the online world for news, information, and entertainment.
For the moment, we see the traditional networks capturing some of the traffic there. However, as this chart shows, there were individual streamers that exceeded many of the legacy media's online channels.
The challenge, as I see it, is that we are still in the early days.
The Entire Web 3.0 Transformation
We are seeing a change in habits. This is probably the most important aspect of the entire discussion.
When it comes to people, we tend to be habitual. Many tuned in on Election Night by clicking on their preferred channel, like they did in the past. There were many, however, who did something different.
As stated, this is taking place across the entire entertainment spectrum. The Internet broke the distribution model that was in place for decades. This is providing a forum where people are able to become part of the process, by having channels on platforms such as YouTube. While the chart above shows the leaders, how many much smaller channels received some traffic?
Therein lies the major issue.
With fragmenting to this degree, we are going to see the numbers grow over time. If a small channel gets 150 viewers on Election Night, that is people who were not watching the traditional networks.
For example, how many channels will stream in the next election and get 150 viewers. There is a good chance it will be higher than this year.
Web 3.0 is going to be heavily driven by AI. We have not seen much (if any) of this. However, over the next few years, this is going to penetrate every digital platform. This means the tools content creators have will increase greatly. Here is where the next wave of disruption comes from.
Demographics are starting to take hold. The Baby Boomers are starting to die off. These, on average, are the ones averse to technological change. The younger generations do not have the same conditioning nor are they opposed to clicking on something else.
This is catastrophic for film and television owned properties. There is a saying going around: 'we are the media". This is not incorrect. People are able to start their own media companies with nothing more than a laptop or smartphone. Obviously, most will never gain any traction but a few might.
The ones that do, end up eating into the market share of the older entities.
AI is going to further change habits as people are able to generate AI entertainment. We are still a couple years away from that. Nevertheless, what happens when someone gets his or her entertainment from a platform? Will they also turn to the same for their Election Night coverage?
This is where I think things are heading. The digital platform will be the foundation of interaction. This is why the "everything App" is a valid concept. Platforms need to consider all the services that people need which can be provided.
For now, we are seeing the legacy media being bombarded. It will not be the last industry to face this.