BENGALURU: Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has started putting out viewership data for news channels in the four Southern languages of India – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, besides data for the other channels starting from week 1 of 2018 (Saturday, 30 December 2017 to Friday 5 June 2018) in the public domain. This was long due, considering the fact that some of the channels, more so the top five channels of each language, have higher viewership than the combined all India viewership of the top five English news channels, notwithstanding the differing demographics. The regional space has a large number of channels catering to various tastes in the local lingo that include GEC, news, sports, kids, etc. With so much of clutter, advertisers can now make an enlightened decision about where to air their message in a particular regional news market.
Earlier, BARC used to furnish data for all the regional channel genres under one head – top five channels for the regional language. There are more than five news channels each for all the four Southern languages. Many of the channels are parts of larger national level media networks/groups/publications. The demographics for Southern news channels are the urban and rural areas in the prime territory/ies for that language and cover all individuals of 2+ age. In the case of Hindi news channels, where BRAC provides data segregated into (Urban + Rural); (Rural) and (urban), the demographics are all 15+ individuals in the respective Hindi Speaking Market or HSM. In the case of English news, BARC provides data for All India (U+R) Males 22+ individuals.
So which are the news channels that have made it to the top five in each of languages in week 1 of 2018?
Tamil News
Let’s start with the Tamil language - The area covered is urban and rural Tamil Nadu/Pondicherry. In week 1 of 2017, Polimer News was ranked first in the Tamil news genre with 37.359 million weekly impressions, followed by Puthiya Thalaimurai with 35.691 million weekly impressions at second place. Thanthi TV was ranked third with 32.647 million weekly impressions followed by News 7 Tamil at fourth place with 22.454 million weekly impressions. At fifth place was the Sun Network’s Sun News with 18.836 million weekly impressions.
Telugu News
The area covered by BARC data is the urban and rural regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
TV9 Telugu headed the Telugu news genre with 52.188 million weekly impressions, followed by NTV Telugu with 41.893 million weekly impressions at second rank. TV 5 News was ranked third in week 1 of 2018 with 35.934 million weekly impressions, followed by ABN Andhra Jyothi at fourth place with 34.642 million weekly impressions. Completing the quintet was V6 News with 30.557 million weekly impressions.
Kannada News
The area covered is Karnataka.
TV9 Kannada headed the top five Kannada news channels list in week 1 of 2017 with 63.623 million weekly impressions. Public TV was ranked second with 43.828 million weekly impressions. Suvarna News 24x7 was ranked third with 22.286 million impressions followed by News 18 Kannada with 16.477 million weekly impressions. At fifth place was BTV News with 11.799 million weekly impressions.
Malayalam News
The market is the Kerala market.
Asianet News was ranked one in week 1 of 2018 with 31.953 tmillion weekly impressions. Malayalam Manorama’s news channel – Manorama News was ranked second with 15.861 million weekly impressions followed by Mathrubhumi News with 11.515 million weekly impressions at third place. At fourth and fifth places were News 18 Kerala and Media One TV with 6.181 million weekly impressions and 4.249 million weekly impressions.
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