(Cenk Uygur, Los Angeles). The Young Turks is the largest online news show in the world. We have just crossed the Million/Billion mark. We have over one million subscribers and one billion views on our YouTube channel. There are only 25 non-music channels in the Million/Billion Club. We are the only news channel in the group.
The average age of CNN’s audience is 68. Isn’t that amazing? The average CNN viewer is retired. When you go over to Fox News, it’s even worse. The average O’Reilly viewer is 71! Only 12 percent of his audience is in the coveted 25-54 age bracket (this is the demo that advertisers find appealing, so everyone on cable news cares more about this number than anything else). This so-called big shot is basically doing his show out of a senior citizens center. 71!!!
Even the youngest skewing show on MSNBC, All In with Chris Hayes, only has about 33 percent of its audience in the 25-54 demo. Everyone else does worse or much, much worse. Cable news is literally ancient.
So, I am greatly amused when CNN keeps rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Ohhh, they brought in Chris Cuomo for the morning show! Whoop dee doo! What is this 1985, where a so-called star will help your morning show and the rest of your lineup will take-off from there? This is so unbelievably antiquated.
First, almost no one in TV news is a star. TV has made everyone so vanilla it’s nearly impossible to tell one anchor apart from another. Quick, tell me the difference between John King and Wolf Blitzer? You said “the beard,” right?
Second, the idea of a doing a standard-bearer morning show that’s basically so general that it’s supposed to appeal to all of America is a concept that is a couple of decades too late. Now, all of media is an ocean. When it was a pool and the audience had limited options, Katie Couric’s winning smile could make a difference. You would swim toward that end of the pool since there were only three channels to choose from. Now, you’re winning smile is lost in the middle of an ocean and no one sees it. You actually have to stand out, not do the same old boring crap.
It is inconceivable that CNN’s morning show or any other show could be anything but horribly boring. Why? Because they won’t let anyone take risks. Everyone’s drowning in vanilla. If you’re a nail that sticks out, you get the hammer. They perceive their brand to be super safe. Well, super safe is super boring.
So, the new CNN morning show debuted to 95,000 viewers in the 25-54 “money” demo. Ouch. To give you a sense of perspective, TYT Network gets 50 million views a month on YouTube alone. That’s well over 1.5 million views a day. But let’s be fair and just consider the main show — The Young Turks. That gets about 30 million views a month. That’s one million views a day. What percentage of our viewers are in the 25-54 demo? 61 percent!
So, that’s 610,000 younger viewers a day for our show and 95,000 for them. But it really doesn’t matter what CNN show you put us up against, we crush them all. And the morning show’s numbers were for its first day. Usually programs go down in numbers after the initial first day interest. On the other hand, the numbers for our show are climbing every single day. Have you heard that viewers are migrating over to online media? Well, they’re already here.
Half of CNN’s audience is above the age of 68. Do you know what percentage of our audience is above 65 years old? 3 percent. Which side of that equation would you rather be on?
Now, can you begin to see why I feel bad for CNN?
Yes, right now they are worth billions of dollars and we are not. But the handwriting is on the wall. Their ship is too big, too costly and too slow. They couldn’t turn that ship around even if they wanted to, and besides, they’ve already hit the iceberg. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. If you’re in this new media ocean, whose boat would you rather be in?
It’s only a matter of time. CNN — see you, wouldn’t wanna be you. Literally.
Comments
Typical of Cenk, he still leaves out logical facts that change the 610,000 viewers equation – I’m hoping he just “forgot” to mention it, but he is literally too smart & talented to not realize this additional logical fact that he forgot to factor for. Here…
The morning show is a full show either 22 mins (half an hour minus ads) or 45 mins (1 hour minus ads) long. Each TYT clip is about 3 mins to 8 mins long, so the TYT equivalent of watching a full morning show would have to be watching several TYT clips. So, if average clip is 5 mins, you need to divide that number 610,000 by 9, and you get nine by doing a 45mins/5mins. So, 610,000 divided by 9 is just under 68,000 – so if the morning show is a half hour show, double the number, it’s about 135,000.
Also, there is another important point about “youtube views” which is just utter BS – they aren’t actually based on how many people watch the clip from start to end, they are based on “page impressions” only. So, you could call that page up and close it before the video even plays and it will still count as “1 view”. Once the initial HTTP request is registered, before the page even loads, it is considered as “1 view”. How many times have you pressed on a link to realize it was the wrong one and closed it or gone back? Or, after hitting the page, changed your mind and gone back, or accidentally clicked on something by a mechanical hand gesture and gone back, or watched the first few seconds and gone back, or seen ad ad that isn’t going away and gone back or just shut the thing down? Now think how how many possible ways you can initiate this request and not end up watching the clip. Now, if you account for these, a good half of the views are automatically gone.
Then there are the hit bots, programs used to artificially increase a networks views by just making heaps of HTTP requests, this is another entirely different issue, which I am guessing TYT will not suffer from too much (as it doesn’t need it) but the fans of TYT may be hit-boting TYT clips to help TYT increase its success.
I won’t even count the last one, because it can’t be measured by us. But counting the other one will bring the number down to 34,000 views when compared with a half hour show and 68,000 views when compared with a one hour show, if we assume half the HTTP requests result in the viewing of an entire clip. However, this 50% figure is speculative, but you know it isn’t 100%, so best case scenario is 68k/135k.
Apart from those “issues” that Cenk didn’t mention, I do want and believe TYT will one day be bigger than CNN, TYT Army Too String :). Can’t wait!
But Cenk, brother, please be more careful when you do logical analysis, include items that are on the other side, even if it makes the story less interesting, it is your responsibility to accurately inform them of the truth 100%. I say this not because of the above, but because I see this happen on the show every day, when I look up a story independently, I notice details that were not included which would have totally negated your arguments/points (sometimes, not all the time) and this is not cool man.
To be honest, and this is just speculation (I haven’t seen any of the internal numbers), I think that TYT’s viewer calculation is wildly overstated. When I watch the live show on YouTube, there are usually about 3,000 people there, and they are probably “regulars.” On this site, there are a couple hundred people in the chat room during the live show. And TYT seems to have, based on the member numbers for shoutouts, about 4,000 subscribed members. So it appears that about 8,000 people watch the full show every day. Ten of thousands of others watch (the highlighted parts of) the show in YouTube clips, but those aren’t unique views–virtually every time I have missed a live show and have wanted to watch the clips, I haven’t stopped at just one clip. I watch all 7 that were posted that day. That’s 1 viewer “viewing the show” 7 times in a day. Also, a lot of the casual fans who watch a clip or two from YouTube are viewing the sensationalistic stories (“Woman with fish is attacked by bear who eats the fish instead of the woman”), which is different from saying that “this is where those people are getting their news.” That might be TYT, but it isn’t hard news about Egypt or Entitlement cuts or private prisons.
Having said all of the above, Cenk is correct when he says that radio “ratings” are nonsense, TV ratings are probably also nonsense, and even by the tricks networks use to bump up their audience, the King of Cable News, FOX, only has about 6 million total viewers that only seem like more because they are diligently glued to FOX all day. If FOX News says “30 million viewers a week,” they are lying as usual–it’s 6 million viewers each tuning in 5 times a week. Also, regardless of what CNN’s ratings show in the newspaper, and forgive the anecdotal analysis, but I don’t know a single person of any age who watches CNN for any reason. So while TYT (in my speculation) takes great liberties when they say that “a million people watch them for news every day,” the entire field is practicing more myth than science.
I watch TYT because they give great coverage of the news, not because they are popular.
Cenk please be careful, and consider taking on a padewan learner *cough* Idarola *cough*, to follow in your footsteps should anything happen to you. You must be familiar with William Cooper and the suspicious scenario surrounding his death by cop, and how he was the head of CAJI, the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence, back in the 90’s, which was a huge network of his listeners committed to the truth. He was murdered, just like your friend Michael Hastings. Search your heart, you know it to be true, no matter how incredible it may be to admit. Dont drive a car with Onstar, please Cenk, you have to admit that you are too important to TYT, TYT Army, and WOLF-PAC, and most of all your family, to not take at least that measure to own a car around 5 years old(see:Mazda RX-8, like me :)). Paranoid is safe, which is better than ‘I wish I had done…”
TOO STRONG!
Ok, Guess what I just found on my Roku the other day.. a TYT channel !! You are as fast as you are strong TYT!! And I’m not talking about having to go look for it in some other channel. There it was, a stand alone TYT channel and I love it!! Since wishes are being granted here… Can we have a better iPhone app? As a member, I want to be able to stream the whole show, or at least have continuous play on the segments. Keeping my fingers crossed! Thanks for all you do!
Yes – set up a Roku Channel! That would be awesome!!!! Thanks!
Holy crap; PLEASE setup a Roku channel. I’m a software architect (yes, really), I’m a huge fan of Cenk (of course!), and I’m willing to help you set it up for free (not kidding). I want to see TYT everywhere, I tell all my friends about you, and…well just do it! 1 million subscribers is at least 1,000,000 x $10 = $10 million, so you have a heck of a good start. :)
When TYT says it gets a million views a day, those aren’t unique viewers, right? Since there’s 8 new videos put up a day (I think?) isn’t it more like 125,000 unique views? I just want to be sure that the same types of numbers are being compared.
I think I heard that it’s something like 15m unique viewers per month. But that was from an old show, a while ago so its very likely that number has gone way up considerably.
All true and well said! I would like to add that CNN got rid of their overseas journalists and I believe they rely on European sources now. At least in the 90’s or the last decade you could easily get breaking news from front line battles, disasters, and political turmoil from American journalists… so sad its all opinion now. It makes sense that a new Network may start as CNN is now (without their billions in cash or “vanilla”) but the amazing thing about TYT is now you have the ability to gain overseas connections and journalist who will clammer to report for you because they know whats on TYT is seen by so many young people all over the world!
As much as I love the idea of TYT being bigger than CNN, Fox News, and Jesus, it would mean nothing unless you can manage to keep the fearless independence that makes it so attractive to people in the first place. I can’t picture TYT ever selling-out though.
You need to get a TYT channel on Roku! CNN, NBC, Democracy Now have a Roku channel.
Even Alex Jones and Fox News have a Roku channel, so why doesn’t TYT???