Who watches Cable News show and how old are they?

In May, 2014, Dylan Byers commented, without source (I presume Nielsen), that “The average Fox News viewer overall is 68.8, while the average ages of MSNBC and CNN viewers were 62.5 and 62.8, respectively.”  The New York Times observed, in July 2013, “Just how old is [Fox News’] audience? It is impossible to be precise because Nielsen stops giving an exact figure for median age once it passes 65. But for six of the last eight years, Fox News has had a median age of 65-plus…” It goes on to say “MSNBC’s median age for its prime-time shows this year is 60.6; CNN’s is 59.8.”.

Regardless, the average age doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the audience.  Is the average age for Fox 68.8 because half the audience is in their 60s and the other half is in their 70s? Or because a large cohort or 30 year olds are balancing out a (larger) cohort of 80 year olds?

To answer that question (just a bit), I offer the “Cable News Dowager Index”, named after the feisty and opinionated Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.  It’s the percentage of total viewers of the show who are NOT in the coveted 25-54 year old demographic.  I assume (blithely) that almost all of these people are older than 54 (a good bet in the realm of Cable News, Ronan Farrow not withstanding).  Here’s last week’s Cable News Dowager Index:

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Fox News and MSNBC have almost an identical Dowager Index, while CNN’s and HLN’s audiences have a smaller Dowager component (and therefore a larger Whippersnapper component.)  So all you Fox and MSNBC fans complaining about the other network are just old and crotchety.

Raw data for your amusement: Dowager Index 2015 01 27.xlsx

I looked at all tweets sent in September that mentioned a cable news show, and ranked the clients used to send them by network.  For each network, here are the top three clients…

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Observations:

• HLN’s mentioners were the most “mobile”.  There’s not a lot of them, but they’re on their sofas, phone in hand.
• MSNBC’s were the least.  Either they’re all watching MSNBC on their computer, or they’re on their sofas, laptop in lap.
• CNN was the most iPhone-ish.  HLN was the most Android-ish (but more iPhone than Android). Foxers were slightly more likely to use an iPhone than MSNBCers.
• The web and iPhone are the most popular channels and about equal in usage.
• iPhone beats Android by about 3 to 2 overall.
• Windows Mobile sent about 1% of all tweets. Blackberries sent about 0.6%.  To be fair, if you’re using the Microsoft Surface, it probably looks like web.
• Tweetdeck sent about 3% of all tweets, Hootsuite about 0.7%.  People are not using “advanced” Twitter clients a whole lot
• The “Mobile Web” (that is, using the web from a mobile device) is tracked separately from “Web” (which, I presume, is non-mobile).  And mobile web was about 1% of all tweets.  People definitely are using native Twitter clients rather than logging into the web on their mobile devices.

Raw data for your own analysis:

• There were 4,332,044 tweets in total that were counted for this analysis.
• Top 1000 clients across all networks (yes, there are more than 1K): 2014-09 Clients All Networks.csv
• All clients responsible for more than 100 tweets on any network, by network: 2014-09 Clients vs Networks.csv

Caveats:

• The idea of what is and what isn’t a cable news related tweet is not well defined. I have over 150 filters defined to catch the tweets, and I think I do a good job, but whether you think I do is another issue.
• I counted tweets, including retweets.  Should I have counted unique senders? Should I have excluded retweets?  Each of these is a reasonable suggestion and may well have changed the scoring.
• I could have missed some tweets, although probably not enough to change anything.  So I think.