Insight

“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

The famous line from Maya Angelou’s poem The Human Family has been used to discuss far loftier topics than television viewing, and rightly so. Yet one of the reasons we are so interested in television viewing is that it reflects what we are interested in as a nation.

In recent years, there has been a great expansion in what we can watch and when we can watch it, allowing us access to an effectively unlimited amount of content. In turn, audiences have fragmented and large, truly shared viewing events are less frequent than they were previously. Nevertheless, such events do present themselves and so we can look at the programmes that act as social glue in an age of limitless choice.

On May 14th 2022, many UK viewers gathered around the TV set (mostly – 99.2% watched on a TV set) to watch the Grand Final of Eurovision. If you haven’t been to a Eurovision party, can you really say you’ve lived? The narrative surrounding this year’s competition was even more compelling, with Ukraine the hot favourites to win — confirming the contest’s history for reflecting international politics — and the surprise appearance of a viable contender from the UK.

The 9.2m who watched on a TV set (of 9.3m in total) formed the largest audience for a Eurovision final since 2011, when even the presence of Jedward didn’t dampen audience enthusiasm.

In March, we looked at how TV viewing was at the heart of Saturday night. As part of that we considered viewers-per-view for Saturday night programmes that showed how viewing them was a shared experience. With the aforementioned Eurovision parties in mind, we looked at this again.

Table 1: Saturday programmes with largest co-viewing audience
Source: Barb, Saturdays January 1st – June 4th 2022. Ranked by largest co-viewing audience.

A viewers-per-view factor of 1.74 for the final of Eurovision on May 14th doesn’t quite bring it to the top of the table. But it has the second largest co-viewing audience, with 5.2m watching with at least one other person.

Clearly the programme with the largest co-viewing audience was the Platinum Jubilee concert — look out for more on that in the next What People Watch: Platinum Jubilee special.

Two weeks after Eurovision, another pan-European contest reached its finale. This time, it was football that brought viewers together. Thanks to BT Sport’s continuing policy of making the match available to view for free via its YouTube channel, the match achieved a whistle-to-whistle audience of 6.2m, peaking at 6.7m.

The last time we discussed the Champions League final in depth, we estimated what proportion of the audience watched via YouTube. Now, thanks to our deployment of router meters in panel member homes, we can report with certainty that 28% of the audience were watching via YouTube on a TV set.

Being able to accurately identify the source of viewing is an important part of Barb’s commitment to measuring TV and TV-like content. But while this headline figure is useful, what we really want to understand is what are those people like? And in what ways are they different, if at all, to the overall TV-set audience?

Happily, our panel-based measurement is able to give us some insight into this part of the audience. In the chart below, we can see that the audience to the final was fractionally more female when viewing via YouTube. We can also see that they were a good deal younger – almost one in four YouTube viewers were aged 16-34 against almost one in five overall. We can also see that the YouTube part of the audience was slightly more C2DE.

In addition, Barb’s data integration with IPA TouchPoints allows us to understand some of this audience’s attitudes, enabling us to build a picture of what makes this 28% of the audience different to the overall audience. Fortunately for them they seem to be happy in their work and see themselves as able to save money. Given that they also regard themselves as adventurous, spontaneous, followers of fashion who enjoy epicurean delights, it’s fortunate that they can save money to pay for it all!

Chart 1: How do those viewing via YouTube differ from the overall audience
Source Barb. Over / under index based on proportion of viewers via YouTube versus proportion of total audience for each item

Those character traits might also help to explain why they turned to YouTube to view the Champions League final. With so many demands on their time and resources, they may find a cable or satellite subscription restrictive. Isolating this audience and looking at their use of the TV set more broadly seems to back this up. While their total identified viewing time in May 2022 was just 1% below the national average, they spent 8% less time with broadcaster content.

Stepping back to take the audience for the Champions League final as a whole (regardless of source) we see a viewers-per-view factor of 1.76 at the point where the audience peaked, marginally ahead of the 1.74 we saw for the final of Eurovision. However, the co-viewing audience for the Champions League of 2.5m is numerically far smaller than the 5.2m who were viewing Eurovision in someone else’s company. Does this mean Champions League final parties are better attended on average than Eurovision parties? Maybe. But what it certainly proves is that Eurovision and football fans are alike in at least one way: big finales are something they enjoy watching on television with others.

Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb