As has already been discussed, big events have a definite impact on the viewership of news channels. To understand this better and analyse how different events evoke disparate viewer responses across various geographic regions we look two events in this week.

News is a major event driven genre and as been witnessed in the past that major happening like 9/11 or the December 13th attack on the Indian Parliament were key drivers for NEWS viewership in the country. On 5th of July another such event happened in Ayodhya and the purpose of this analysis is to measure the degree of impact on the news viewership of Hindi NEWS Channels.

Before and After July 5th, 2005

We already have established that there were major change in the Hindi news environment between June 2004 and 2005. This leads us to take the ratings of June 2005 as the base with which the ratings of July 5th will be compared.

Also, to make the comparison complete we will look at short-term gains and compare the ratings of 5th July, 2005 with those of the previous day.

Thus, the analysis will have the following stages:

• A comparison of the ratings of AajTak, NDTV India and Hindi NEWS Genre on 4th, 5th and 6th of July.
• A comparison for 5th July with the ratings of June 2005.
  
  

Looking at the ratings of June 2005 for Mumbai (Figure 7) in one-hour day parts we observe that the ratings of Hindi NEWS genre peaked at 0.8 in the 8AM to 9AM day part, whereas on 5th July the ratings kept on climbing and a rating of 1.92 was hit at 2PM. It declined to 0.67 by 5PM, which were the usual levels for June 2005 and started climbing till 1.45 by 8 PM and till 2.20 by 11PM.

The level of 2.2 was 22% higher than the highest peak for June 2005. A visual analysis of Figure 7 also clearly shows the lead taken by NDTV in Mumbai. For the day AajTak also peaked at 0.34 in the 1PM to 2PM time slot.


This is four times the rating of 0.09 that it managed on 4th July and 30% higher than the June average for the day part.

• The average rating for AajTak for June 2005 was 0.10 with a market share of 1.07 and for 5th July it went up to 0.17 with a market share of 1.99 %
• NDTV India had a rating of 0.12 and a market share of 1.29 for the month of June and it shot up to 0.18 and market share increased to 2.11
• The impact of the attack was much more on the viewership of AajTak than on NDTV India. NDTV India came out as the preferred channel as it managed to breach AajTak ratings even in the morning day part when the attacks happened.
• Hindi News genre managed a rating of 0.92 for the day with a market share of 10.67. In June the same figures stood at 0.63 and 6.63 respectively.

The above said figures clearly indicate a huge jump in the viewership of news channels and as per the laws of economics the largest players gain the most during a sudden surge of demand and the same has been proven where in top channels have gained.

It is evident from Figure 8 that over 4th July figures AajTak has improved its ratings and that there is a residual effect continuing on 6th also.

The impact of Ayodhya attack is clearly visible here and the major role played by these news channels is evident from the fact that they are driving the viewership of the news genre in Ahmedabad. AajTak is the clear favourite amongst the Ahmedabadis when it comes to breaking news and especially if it is about something with which they are emotionally attached. The ratings of news channels hit a high of 3 at the 9PM slot, which is 3 times the rating of 1 that it achieved in June2005 for the same time band. In the 1PM slot the ratings of 1.7 was again 3 times 0.5 for the same slot for the month of June.

In June 05 AajTak had a rating of 0.11 with Market Share of 1.69 that shot up to 0.28 and 3.82 respectively on July 5th. NDTV India had a rating of 0.10and a market share of 1.56 for June 2005 that went up to 0.18 and market share to 2.5 on July 5th.

News Genre had a rating of 0.67 and market share of 9.27 on 5th July up from 0.36 and a market share of 5.70. This is an astounding raise of 4% point in the market share.

• This goes on to prove a point that specific content attracts certain audience as is evident from the huge increase in the viewership of news channels in Ahmedabad which is much higher than that in Mumbai.
  
  
• We may also hypothesize that viewers in Ahmedabad are more concerned about the happenings in Ayodhya because of the past instances of Ayodhya related violence. In this emotionally charged atmosphere the channel, which comes out as a clear choice of the masses in Ahmedabad, is AajTak.
  
  
• Using viewer preference for a particular channel during breaking news and it can be hypothesized that AajTak enjoys more brand loyalty when it comes to covering events with whom common man has a certain emotional connect.