The jolly old BBC keeps repeating that yesterday's royal nuptials were watched by an 'estimated two billion people worldwide' but they don't say how this estimate was arrived at.
If we consider that yesterday was a normal working day for most of the world, that has to mean that a large part of the world's population of 7 billion were at work at the time of the wedding. We also have to take into acount that it's unlikely that many people in China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or the countries of South East Asia would have watched, and neither would most of the populations of the Arab world and, particularly, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya. We can probably take out most of the rest of the middle east, too. What about Russia and the assorted states that were previously part of the Soviet Union ? I have some difficulty believing that the Turkmens, Khazaks and the like were all clustered around thier 50 inch plasma TVs.
Most of Africa would surely have been occupied more with their own survival than with watching a couple of unknowns in a foreign land and one also has to wonder what the viewing figures from Mexico, and Central and South America were.
This actually leaves us with western Europe, the USA and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan as the only countries where any significant part of the population would have been likely to watch the ceremonies; many in these populations would have been at work or school, or been too young or old or disinterested, or not had access to a television. If we were to assume that, perhaps, 50% of the populations of these areas really did watch, then the likely viewing figures would have been more like 500 million, rather than the grossly overestimated 2 billion suggested by the BBC; if 10% of the rest of the world watched, the total would still only have been around one billion. Of course, more people may have seen highlights on their own news channels, but that hardly counts - I sometimes see all sorts of uninteresting rubbish, such as stories about sports or other programmes, as part of our news broadcasts but can surely not be counted as having watched the original programmes.
Why is it that the media feels a constant need to exaggerate everything it touches ?
You might want to look here in order to start working out a more accurate stab at the overall viewing figure.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.worldtvpc.com/blog/royal-viewcount-fails-reach-hype/
Having looked as suggested, it seems that the report actually supports my view that viewing figures of 2bn are pretty exaggerated. Is your point that my own estimates are too high or too low ? As you will have read :
ReplyDelete"A BBC analyst said of this realisation: “It’s absurd to think that one-third of the world’s population watched the Royal Wedding. Most people around the world were asleep. If you think about it for a moment, it’s nonsense.”
If anything, with well under 10% of the US population watching, and only 3 or 4% of Indians, it seems highly likely that even 1bn may be a significant overestimate. My way of arriving at my figures may have been haphazard and not very scientific, but I suggest that my answer ain't far from the truth.
I suspect it's no where near even 500 million: you seem to have omitted one crucial factor in already pretty generous calculations: much (most?) of the world was asleep!
ReplyDeleteThis is something of a sterile arguement. My original point was that the media habitually exaggerates in its reports and that point seems to be well proven by the figures published so for. Whether people were at work, asleep or simply not interested doesn't really make any difference.
ReplyDelete