You're Old

Posted by Michael Dance

According to a new article in Variety, the average age of TV viewers of the five major networks is 50. That's a little bit hilarious, because advertisers' favorite demographic -- the people they pay the majority of their money to target - is 18-49-year-olds.

The network skewing oldest was - no surprise - CBS, with a median age of 54. Even their shows targeting a young audience - like the buzzy but low-rated How I Met Your Mother - had median ages of 45. And it's not just CBS - ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, which gained a lot of status by airing music videos about f***ing celebrities, has a median age of 50.

This is all rather troubling because the median age for households is 38 - meaning less and less younger people are watching TV...when it airs. The big asterisk is that all this data comes from people who view the shows when they air -- meaning that all of those folks who use newfangled devices like DVR and the Internets skew younger -- meaning old advertising models need a lot of tweaking if traditional TV is to survive. That may sound dramatic, but it's true.

Might this make the wildly flawed Nielsen ratings obsolete?

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